PhotoMontage help

Xavion wrote on 5/6/2005, 9:45 AM
I'm trying to put together a photo and video DVD for the parents at
my son's Judo school. I've collected footage and photo's from
parents and students and find it difficult to put together a decent
photo slide show with pictures from multiple camera's. I guess the
biggest problem I have would be the different boarders and sizes
of the pictures.

Should I just put the photo's on the time line in Vegas5 and use
Ultimate S or Excalibur to make a PhotoMontage and not be
concerned with all of the different size photo's?

Any ideas or pointers would really be appreciated.

Comments

BillyBoy wrote on 5/6/2005, 9:52 AM
In my opinion you should fill the frame. Having photos of various sizes some with, some without borders, (because they don't fill the frame) some in landscape mode, others not, gets distracting. Use pan/crop to make your photos fill the frame, then if you like add keyframes to add some automation.
JackW wrote on 5/6/2005, 10:20 AM
Sometimes owing to the composition of the photos you really have to use different sizes and formats. One thing that will help keep this from being too abrupt when you transition between shots is to try to keep the center of attention -- e.g., the eyes in head and shoulder shots -- in roughly the same place on the screen as you cut or dissolve from pic to pic. If you can't do this, slow cross fades seem to work more smoothly than cuts.

Try to do the same thing with captions, so you don't have text jumping all over the screen as you go from shot to shot, unless that's an effect your trying for its impact .

Jack
JohnnyRoy wrote on 5/6/2005, 10:53 AM
This is what I do every year and why I initially wrote the Photo Montage tool in Ultimate S. I do a video yearbook for my children’s middle school and I get pictures of the 8th grade graduating class from all the parents. This includes pictures of the children growing up as well as plenty of school activities shot on all sorts of different cameras. You should see some of the stuff I get.

I go through them and clean them up a bit (color correct older shots, remove date-time stamps, etc.) but I never worry about size or aspect. I let Ultimate S handle this. Ultimate will match the aspect of images to the project and add all the pan and zoom to keep the shots interesting. You may have to go back and adjust some shots that were portrait instead of landscape but these will be obvious.

I realize I’m biased because I wrote Ultimate S, but it saves me a lot of time in putting these photo montages together quickly.

~jr
jetdv wrote on 5/6/2005, 11:38 AM
The 4.2 update to Excalibur also adds some new Photo Montage abilities to the PBS Wizard. Besides automatically applying Match Aspect and Reduce Interlace Flicker, it will now automatically pan the images as well. This is especially noticable on tall, narrow, images. It can now pan up or down up to the entire distance of the image (the distance used is randomly chosen).

I ran a quick example using about 15 images from a montage. Here's how Excalibur 4.0 works to automate motion:

Excalibur 4.0 method

With the new additions to PBS Wizard, here's how it now works in version 4.2 to automate motion:

Excalibur 4.2 with Panning

Xavion wrote on 5/6/2005, 1:13 PM
Thank you guy's very much!!!
johnmeyer wrote on 5/6/2005, 4:04 PM
I like to fill the frame, but the transition from SD to HD, and the letterboxing on DVDs has made many people more accepting of black bars around pictures. Sometimes a picture just doesn't look right when cropped full screen.

I'm in the midst of the mother of all slide shows -- over a thousand pictures submitted from the local high school which I am editing down into twelve separate music videos. Here's a link to one of the early rought drafts of one of these. Perhaps it will give you some ideas:

Still Photo Then and Now

When you get to the page, right-click on "ThenNow" and save to your local disk and then play. You may need a Yahoo account to download the file. The "Priestly.wmv" file also has nothing but still photos.