johnmeyer,

Great work on that show! That had to take forever to do? Your parents must have loved it too! I really enjoyed it, nice job.

Thanks. Actually it didn't take too long because I had already assembled thousands of slides, videos and film transfers as part of a several year-long project to digitize all the family's visual assets. The two music pieces were dictated by the fact that they are "their" songs.

The other slide show (the Wedding tribute) was much more difficult. The groom's mother stopped by with a shopping bag full of pictures (400 of them) and 8mm and Super8 film (21 reels). That took a long time to capture. I then received several disks filled with photos from other members of the family. I had no inspiration for music. Also, most of the pictures I received were when they were both very small. I decided therefore to go with that, and hit on the idea of using the really racy music from "Sweet Charity" as the opening. That worked really well (if I do say so myself). I then added some silly songs in the middle, and then went straight for the schmaltz at the end with Nat/Natalie Cole's "Unforgettable." I really wanted to be innovative, because the audience was mostly young, hip artists from San Francisco's media gulch. I'm afraid it wasn't up to their standards, but it was good enough.

'Good enough'?...yes it is. What do these young kids know anyway?

(My kids seem to out-smart me all the time)

I have a Happauage WinTV Go capture card, but this slideshow is doing using only scanned in pictures. I don't have a DV camcorder or anything like that. All I have is my X-Box and TV-Out from my Radeon video card.

I've seen the two slideshows that you mentioned and they are superb. I've noticed that you try to sync the slideshow to the music.

Do you have any recommendations on love songs that could be synced up to a slideshow? (meaning, I could transition pictures at the bass beats or something similar)

>My last question is regarding "hot pixels". (at least I'm pretty sure that is what they are called) I'm scanning in a lot of pictures (4x6 inch) and when I'm rendering my slideshow in vegas I see a bunch (maybe 5 or so per picture) that keep flashing bright white. Is there any way to fix this?

You'll note that no one has as yet understood this question as it wasn't clear enough. Is it *every* picture? Are these pixels in the *same* spot every time? Have you opened the pictures into another app and checked to see if they appear there as well? Vegas shouldn't be doing anything to cause them, so it does sound like dust spots on the scanner as was previously suggested. Post back and confirm, please.

After looking at the pictures a little closer, they are dust spots that are pure white... and for some reason they blink when vegas does a pan or a zoom over them.

Are there any ways to get a cleaner scan with less dust? I'm assuming I have to just keep the glass clean. Any tips for this? Just use windex? I'm using an HP 3500c scanner.

Also, regarding the file formats... I tried rendering to NTSC DV and it looked pretty bad (not even close to uncompressed or Huffyuv quality). Are you sure NTSC DV is what I should use?

Ah, so it was dust spots. As you saw in my first post above, that is what I suspected. Dust is the curse of the still photographer (and now of the still picture scanner).

With a flatbad, when you are scanning prints, there is no magic bullet. You just have to keep things clean. Prints are amazingly dirty. Get a soft cloth and brush them off before you scan. Change the cloth frequently. Clean the glas whenever you notice problems. Finally, learn to use the clone tool in your photo editor. Ultimately, that is the only way to remove the spots, and as you have already found, they can be quite distracting.

As for music suggestions, there are about 80 million love songs out there, and I would be presumptuous to suggest one. Choice of music depends on whether you are trying to be serious or playful (or something else) in your presentation. It also depends on your audience. In the slideshow I disucssed in the last post, I almost didn't use the "Unforgettable" music because I thought it wouldn't be well-received by the 20-something crowd.

Ok, thanks again for the replies.

The slideshow is only for my girlfriend and she will be the only one watching it. I'll have to look through some songs to find the right one.

As for scanning, you have helped me out enourmously in my other thread, but I had one last (hopefully) question... Do you Sharpen your scans at? My scanning software (the included HP software) has an option to "Sharpen" photographs and they seem to look much better if I use "Extreme" sharpening...

Any thoughts?

>Do you Sharpen your scans at? My scanning software (the included HP software) has an option to "Sharpen" photographs and they seem to look much better if I use "Extreme" sharpening...

Best not to do it in the scanning software, since it cannot be undone. And beware that when overdone it is a mark of an amateur :-) Sure it looks good initially, then you start to notice these dark halos around all your objects and pretty soon that's all you see :-) You want your sharpen to be seen without being seen.

In small doses, sharpen is good. (You'll want to make it stronger if you're going to print your picture.) But it can also aggravate some TV issues when panning, e.g., combing, moire et al.

Also, the normal sharpen effect is inferior to some alternatives. "Unsharp mask" generally does a better job. And if you want the best job, take a look at http://mediasoftware.sonypictures.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?ForumID=4&MessageID=139937.

In that thread, I suggested duplicating the video track, leaving the 2nd (back) track as normal, and adding the convolution filter to the 1st (front) track, then blending the two via the opacity. Lately, I've abandoned that style as overkill (very slow rendering) and simply settled on adding the convolution filter to a single track. I use very low settings, i.e., in the convolution filter:

-1 -1 -1
-1 # -1
-1 -1 -1

where instead of the "#" value, I use something like 30 for high sharpening and 40 for low sharpening. As you'll see if you try it, the effect is subtle, but that is how it should be, IMHO.

Some graphical editting tools have a cleaning filter you can try, instead of the more manual cloning. Photoshop, for example, has a filter called Filter->Noise->Dust and Scratches.

I might suggest a wonderful site at: http://luminous-landscape.com.
In particular, there is a great tutorial at http://luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/workflow1.shtml, which takes you through a series of steps from scan to final product. Even if you don't have Photoshop, its a great resource.