I visited Grand Teton, Yellowstone and Rocky Mountain National Parks in August and took a LOT of nice still pictures plus a lot of good video. Now I want to collect the best still pictures and the best video clips and create documentary style movies, one (or more) for each park.
My plan is to create a number of chapters for each park with each chapter as a separate video in MS3, then output it as an MPEG-2 file which will then be imported by MovieFactory 2 where I will create the menu and burn to DVD. I would like to begin each chapter with a title page describing where and what this is. There might also be additional title pages within the chapter.
On the surface, this sounds easy enough, but I have some questions:
1. If I start each chapter (video clip) with a title page, this title page will end up being the thumbnail picture for the menu created in MF2. The title page will NOT make a very attractive thumbnail - you might see that there is some text there, but you certainly cannot read it. And if I use a fade-in title, there won't be anything there, except maybe a blue rectangle. Is there a way I can get MF2 to use another still image for the thumbnail? My only thought is that I would have to insert a still picture as the first event in the video, then follow that with the title, then the stills and video clips. Is that the best I can do?
2. My video clips already have sound, like a waterfall or people talking, etc. But when I intersperse still pictures with the video, all of a sudden there is silence. What do I do to make this more pleasant? Should I add background music that plays across both the stills and the videos? Then maybe use a volume envelope to increase the volume during the stills and decrease it during the videos?
I'm sure I'm not the first one to want to combine still pictures and videos together on a DVD. I'm not looking for professional results, but on the other hand I don't want it to look "hokey". You guys that have already done this, could you give me some advice? It would be much appreciated.
Per M-W, "hokey" means 1. CORNY, 2. obviously contrived, 3. PHONY.
My plan is to create a number of chapters for each park with each chapter as a separate video in MS3, then output it as an MPEG-2 file which will then be imported by MovieFactory 2 where I will create the menu and burn to DVD. I would like to begin each chapter with a title page describing where and what this is. There might also be additional title pages within the chapter.
On the surface, this sounds easy enough, but I have some questions:
1. If I start each chapter (video clip) with a title page, this title page will end up being the thumbnail picture for the menu created in MF2. The title page will NOT make a very attractive thumbnail - you might see that there is some text there, but you certainly cannot read it. And if I use a fade-in title, there won't be anything there, except maybe a blue rectangle. Is there a way I can get MF2 to use another still image for the thumbnail? My only thought is that I would have to insert a still picture as the first event in the video, then follow that with the title, then the stills and video clips. Is that the best I can do?
2. My video clips already have sound, like a waterfall or people talking, etc. But when I intersperse still pictures with the video, all of a sudden there is silence. What do I do to make this more pleasant? Should I add background music that plays across both the stills and the videos? Then maybe use a volume envelope to increase the volume during the stills and decrease it during the videos?
I'm sure I'm not the first one to want to combine still pictures and videos together on a DVD. I'm not looking for professional results, but on the other hand I don't want it to look "hokey". You guys that have already done this, could you give me some advice? It would be much appreciated.
Per M-W, "hokey" means 1. CORNY, 2. obviously contrived, 3. PHONY.