>Just keep your clips short and the music peppy!

Excellent advice! I'd start by reviewing your material and trying to get some idea of how you'd like to organise / order it. Then put down some music as a bed and arrange the video / stills on top of it. You can use audio envelopes to adjust the balance between the sound bed and the "native" audio, but I like to keep the background music audible for continuity and pace. You can add some extra interest to the stills with pan and crop - I like reducing them to thumbnail size and "flying" them across the screen. But not too often!

Ian G.

Just made something like this after a trip to the Faroe islands (near Iceland) where I lived with my parents 50 years ago. I combined the scanned old black/white photos with new stills and video clips.
As sound tracks to the old B/W photos I used some of the tracks from the new videoclips - there is mostly plenty of spare footage - or one can reuse a little, maybe just changing the volume and avoiding passages of sounds, that people might remember.

Long story short (or maybe not so short)...

Both my parents passed away within 4 months of each other due to cancer. As executor, I went through their house to determine what should go to who. I have four sisters and wanted to be as fair as possible. I ended up with two huge rubber-maid style buckets of old photographs in shoe boxes, albums, plastic bags or just lying loose. My one sister took all the photos and was going to have a family get together to go over the photographs and divide them up. Well, two years went by and no get together.

So, I got the pictures back and scanned them all into my computer. There were around 500 in total. Then I used Movie Studio 3 to put together individual slide shows with transistions and music. Then a DVD was put together with a menu leading to each slide show.

The break down went like this:
1) Photos of my dad growing up and his family
2) Photos of my mom growing up and her family
3) Photos of their Wedding Day
4) Photos of their 35th Anniversary
5) Photos of their 50th Anniversary
6) Photos of us kids growing up grouped by each child in chronological order
7) Photos of their family and friends
8) Photos of a house that my dad built as he was constructing it in chronological order

Once the DVD was put together, I gave a copy of it (along with the scanned photos on CD) to each of my sisters so everyone had a copy of the photos. The photos were all scanned at 300 dpi, so if there is a special picture that anyone wants, they can just get a print made from the scanned photo.

The photos by the way, still sit in the buckets uder the stairs at my sisters house.

Hope this helps somewhat...
Al

Thanks Al!
I know that was alot of work but it is worth it! Is 300 DPI a good resolution for photos?
Mike

The scanning resolution depends on the size of the photo and what you want to do with it. If you scan a 5x7" photo and want it to fill the frame then you only need about 100dpi resolution. On the other hand, if you have a 2.25x3.25 wallet photo and you want to zoom in on someone's face that only fills the middle 1/4 of the picture, you'll have to scan at about 1200dpi. There is no single answer to this question. The only way to be sure is to measure and do the math.