Slide show - how to render as compact as possible?

Christian de Godzinsky wrote on 6/19/2011, 3:42 AM

Hi,

I have almost finished a Blu-ray project and I have still about 1Gbyte free on the disk. I would like to att a self-playing slideshow with as many still pics as possible. Nothing fancy, just one pic showing for 3 seconds, no crossfades or any other effects.

Rendering still images from the timeline in the HD format produces an approximage 162Mbyte/min video file. Thats a lot for 20 images that were originally just about 2MBytes each.

My question - is there a trick that I could use to render out in another format (still full HD resolution but smaller bandwidth) that the Blu-ray player can handle?

Or is there something I can fiddle around with in the GOP settings to fool it to make an I-frame every 3 seconds (every 75 frames - I'm in PAL land) to save valuable disk space when generating slide shows out of still images?

This question might be of interest to many others - or at least a ingenious answer :)

Cheers,

Christian

Comments

farss wrote on 6/19/2011, 4:09 AM

I don't know about the BD disks but the SD DVD spec does support a "slideshow" which is just a set of jpg images. From memory something tells the player how long to display each image for and you can have a soundtrack as well. The whole "show" takes up very , very little space. Unfortunately nothing from SCS will create this.

As you only have straight cuts you can encode at a very low bitrate. To avoid uglies at each cut add a Marker at each and make certain the "Insert I Frame At Marker" check box is ticked in the encoder. The only limitation you might strike is a limitation of 100 markers and hence 100 images using this trick.

Bob.

Christian de Godzinsky wrote on 6/20/2011, 4:30 AM

Thanks Bob, that did the trick. DVDA from SCS can produce slide-shows within your DVD or Blu-ray project, just contrary what you said. However, I'm grateful mentioned this possibility!

DVDA seems to have a 99 marker limit (as you said) for DVDs, but Blu-ray is tenfold better (999 marker limit). I can go ahead and make my 200 picture slide-show, and make it very compact indeed...

Christian

johnmeyer wrote on 6/20/2011, 7:47 AM

If you want to make the slide show REALLY small, the trick that I've posted many times before is to put the slides is a music compilation in DVD Architect. The slides are encoded as a single "I" frame and take up virtually no space. You can encode, literally, tens of thousands of slides on a DVD. However, they all have to be the same duration, and you can't put music underneath the slides, so there are some serious tradeoffs.

Laurence wrote on 6/20/2011, 5:56 PM

johnmeyer wrote on 6/20/2011, 7:19 PM

Maybe you could go a little beyond this by coming up with an interval like say one second for an iframe. Then as long as you were doing an even number of seconds per frame, you could have some flexibility of length of a slide by repeating each iframe as long as the number of seconds you wanted to hold that image.The music compilation trick for photos creates a slideshow where the default duration of each slide is five seconds. I never figured out a way to get DVD Architect to let me make each slide last for a different amount of time.

You CAN change the default duration for the entire set of slides using a "hidden preference" that you get using the hidden trick for bringing up the "internal" dialog. And no, you can't change this and then drag a photo to the compilation and have it be a different duration; as soon as you change the preference, all existing photos in the music compilation change to the new default duration.

I do think, however, that if you were really into doing this, you could edit the resulting set if IFO files in PGCEdit, but that's way too much work.

[edit]Oh, I forgot to mention that you can actually add music, but each music clip must match the duration (five seconds) of each still photo.

Again, all this only applies if you are trying to use this trick of using a music compilation in order to get a ridiculously small file size for a slide show. For a more normal slideshow, use the picture compilation instead.

Christian de Godzinsky wrote on 11/9/2011, 12:48 PM

John,

Can you confirm one thingy? How does DVDA compile the Picture Compilation. Is it just a plain rendered video file (VOB) on the finalized DVD-disk?

If this is the case - what is the benefit of making a picture compilation in DVDA - when you can do it with more flexibility in VP - as a video project? Especially if the end result file size is the same?

Cheers

Christian

musicvid10 wrote on 11/9/2011, 2:17 PM

Using an AVC codec with VBR, you should be able to render an HD 720p slideshow at about 160Kbps and retain full quality. That is without transitions and fades. The bitrate will jump momentarily on the first frame of each new slide, and during any fades, transitions, movement, etc.