Thanks Chienworks,

While I do have quite a few photos, I have some volounteer parents doing some sorting and cropping so I'll mention these dimensions to them.

By the way, you mention 654x480 to fill the frame but output to 720x480. Why the 66 pixel difference in the width?

Thanks,
Randy

RandyS,
Here's a couple of other points to help you get going. Save your pictures to one file folder and number them in the sequence you want them to show up...001, 002, etc. You can just rename the file and put the numbers in front of the file name. This will allow you select all of the pictures at once and drag them onto the vegas timeline and VMS will automatically put them in order and create a crossfade transition between each. You have to set your defaults up in options->preferences->video first. Once there, go down to the file length and identify how long you want the still to be (I use 6 seconds), then go down to the transition length and set it to the number of seconds you want (I use 2, that gives your picture 4 seconds of display time). Your default setting will build your whole slide show when you drag the files onto the timeline. Then you can add pan/crop motion to specific pictures using key frames, check aspect ratio (right click on the photo while in pan/crop and check maintain aspect ratio is what I do), and add music. If you want, after you add music, play it and tap the m key with the beat. Then go back and adjust your pictures to the length between markers where you want to break up the action. That will make for a very entertaining show. Hope this helps. VMS is a great program and will do most anything us home hobbists will need.
Randy
P.S. writing from work so may not have the menu options all right above.

I'll sneak in here quickly and answer the question for Chienworks...

DV resolution and DVD resolution are both 720x480 pixels (NTSC), but these are rectangular shaped pixels, not square. If 4:3 format, each pixel is a somewhat skinny rectangle (slightly narrower than it is tall).

If widescreen DV or DVD, each pixel is wider than it is tall. There still are only 720x480 pixels in a widescreen video format, but each pixel is stretched out wider.

For digital photos, and scanned images, etc., pixels are always "square" pixels, so a 654x480 image of square pixels will match up to a 4:3 DV or DVD image of 720x480 skinny, rectangular pixels.

If you do the math for a 4:3 image of square pixels, you'd come up with 640x480. However, the 4:3 video format isn't really 4:3 -- that's just an approximation. 654x480 or 655x480 should work out right for you. (The exact value is somewhere in between).

Keep in mind that if you plan to pan or zoom in on any of the pictures (often makes the slideshow more interesting) you'll want to start out with a slightly higher resolution -- maybe 900x600 or so -- whatever the correct ratio would be.

(I don't recall offhand what square-pixel resolution you would use for photos and scans to match up to widescreen video.)

Tim L

Widescreen is a little easier because 16:9 really is 16:9. So, 16/9 of 480 is 853.333... which means you should use 853x480.

Thanks everyone for the excellent definition. The "m" for marker is excellent too because I would like to sync some images to the music.

I'm off to a good start but I've come up with 1 remaining question. Using VMS to build the slideshows I've created a 3 minute slide show with 44 slides and 1 audio track using the default settings for MPEG 1 and MPEG 2.

The MPEG 1 file is 44Mb and the MPEG 2 file is 95Mb. The MPEG 2 file looks better but do these file sizes translate to the final DVD built with DVD Architect? ie, I could get more slides on a DVD using MPEG 1 source?

OR ... does DVD Archetect crank everything into the same MPEG2 format? So no matter how I compress the video for the slideshows, the end result would be the same size on the DVD?

Thanks again everyone,
Randy

Don't bother with MPEG 1. In order for your DVD to play on a standard DVD player, it should be MPEG2. (Also, MPEG1 is a lower quality format.)

And don't worry about the size of your files. The DVD (single layer) holds roughly 4.7 GB. You should be able to fit an hour or more of MPEG2 video (with audio) onto a single layer DVD, using the highest quality setting.

You are right though: DVD Architect will convert everything to MPEG2 -- even if you supplied it with an MPEG1 file -- because MPEG2 is the only legitimate format for a DVD.

You can render to MPEG2 for DVD Architect Studio from within Vegas Movie Studio, or you can render to DV AVI from within VMS, send that file to DVDA/S, and have DVDA/S convert the AVI file to MPEG2. Theoretically, you might be able to get slightly higher quality rendering to AVI and then having DVDA/S render to MPEG2, because from within DVDA/S you can manually select the highest available MPEG2 bit rate. However, the bitrate VMS uses (which you cannot change) seems pretty good, and keeps you from having to render twice.

Tim L