Slide Show: transitions and resolution

ericlast wrote on 5/29/2005, 9:02 AM

I've just started using VMS (after wasting money on Premiere Elements, and migrating from Pinnacle to Ulead!). I'm very, very happy with the power and stability of the program so far, and am amazed at how much it can do with so little memory!

I've started a "slide show" project that will include many digital pix from a recent trip.

My questions:

1-When I import a bunch of pictures from the media pool, the pictures arrange themselves one after the other; since they don't overlap, there is no automatic transition effect. Is there a way to import multiple pictures at once and have the program automatically insert the default transition, or do I need to manually shift the pictures to overlap so the transition will occur?

2-The pictures are being imported from a 4MP digitial camera with the images saved at full resolution. Should I reduce the resolution of the pictures (since the TV images won't be able to take advantage of the full computer resolution) and, if so, what's the best way people have found to do this?

Thanks in advance for the help. I've already learned a great deal just by looking around the forum before my purchase!

Eric

Comments

Elmo27376 wrote on 5/29/2005, 11:11 AM

1. Yes, you will have to add the transitions manually.

2.Take a look at the posting farther down the page; I believe it is Glitter problem or something like that.

You might try the transitions and see what result you get but many have found that using the Pan/Crop feature with stills has produced artifacts that are annoying to say the least. I found the a resolution or 150 and a size of 900 X 600 seems to improve the situation to a tollarable state.

g

allyn wrote on 5/30/2005, 10:51 PM

VMS isn't really intended for slide shows and isn't really that good at it. while it is possible to use it, it will be much harder than using a dedicated program intended for making slide shows.

you may be stinging from spending money on other programs already, but i suggest looking at proshow gold from photodex ( http://photodex.com ), $70. it will save you a lot of time and probably come out better in the end.

ericlast wrote on 5/31/2005, 5:15 AM

Thanks for the info..

Allyn - What my audiences (i.e. family) has always enjoyed is a DVD with video footage shot from vacations, family events, etc, followed by a slide show type of presentation of the digital stills taken from the same event.

What I might do is use Ulead (still on my system so I can take advantage of the SmartSounds app) to create the slide show, render it as and .avi file, then include that in my VMS production.

IanG wrote on 5/31/2005, 7:26 AM

Eric, don't forget you can mix video and stills - you don't have to do the video followed by the slide show. You can create a nice ambience by taking some background audio from the camcorder footage and using it with the stills. Or try cutting away from the video to the stills, with the same audio carrying on. In Pinnacle, these are "advanced techniques", in MS they're easy!

Ian G.

allyn wrote on 5/31/2005, 8:37 AM

i recently made a dvd with a slide show made from proshow gold, and atwo videos made mostly with muvee autoproducer.

proshow gold can do slide shows that include video but the editing is very rudimentary (crop X seconds from front, crop X seconds from end).

ChristerTX wrote on 6/7/2005, 11:10 AM

I looked at the ProShow Gold Trial and I included an AVI file and some photo's.
The resulting MPEG had a poor quality on the video portion but the images looked great.

Is that you rexperience as well?

That's too bad as MS does a great job with the video but the images might get artifacts as previously discussed.

To bad I can't produce an AVI from ProShow of the slide show and combine it with my video in MS .....

Christer

allyn wrote on 6/7/2005, 10:00 PM

why can't you combine an avi from proshow gold and video in vms?

jtfrazer wrote on 6/8/2005, 6:25 AM

The problem is that ProShow Gold (PSG) can't produce an AVI file. I have had some success with using the MPEG2 file that PSG produces. I've also made DVDs with both a PSG slide show and a VMS video as separate shows on a DVD.

Jim

allyn wrote on 6/8/2005, 9:08 AM

sorry, i didn't realize that proshow gold only outputs mpeg files.

flashersmasher wrote on 6/14/2005, 8:10 AM

PSG can't save as an .avi file. I've had some discussions with them and it sould be included in a future update. PSG does work great with stills. VMS and PSG do work well together. Blending slides with video. I would do the audio in VMS. Much better control. The audio track start up in PSG seems a bit noisy. You can still do the slide/music timing in PSG but remove the audio before saving and reinsert it in VMS. It will be great when PSG updates the .avi thing.