I wouldn't say these are "automatically generated". Sounds to me like these are done manually by professionals. It's a service and you pay a fee for it, it isn't software that you buy, If the fee is reasonable, then it might be well worth it. All that I saw can be done in Vegas but they'd be nothing automated about it.

Hey Rich

You can do cool slide shows by using PNGs with transparency

1 example to get you thinking in this way

1 pic of people next to building boring right

Now ad mesh fence png transparency in front

Zoom into mesh move slightly to the right
as you do this move the building pic slightly to the left and so on

if you turn your levels into 3d and move the mesh forward on the ed plane move the 3d building plane back and rotate slightly the effects are even better

the cool thing about using pics in this way is your compositions are always great
use the old SOLTAX composition theory. It works

a very clever example of an x composition is RAY’s photo of himself on vimeo "underground planet "

if you flip that pic your eye would travel up the shoulder to the face then it could also be an o composition

Rory

Thanks to all that replied. I know Vegas is powerful and I can do a lot of cool things, but I was hoping to get (buy?) photo slideshow templates that I could drop images into and have the slideshow automated. As I said in my original email, Ultimate S from VAAST does have some of this functionality.

I can purchase stand alone software that does nothing but create slideshows, but I wanted to stay in the Vegas environment.

thanks again,
Rich

The point that i didn’t make clear before is what makes a good slide show

Not fancy transitions although this is useful for effect

Good composition and logical sequence cut to the beat will make a good slide show

I downloaded Vasst it is brilliant and will do this.
i ordered it from our IT dept, but you still have to tweak the pan and zooms to the correct focal point etc,
And crop so that your pic comps are balanced

No software can do this. you need a trained eye and most important this is the creative enjoyable part
and will make your stuff unique

that site doesn't show a slide show, a slide show is just one image after another. anything else takes more time.

there's nothing wrong with buying a piece of software that does very very very creative "slide shows" for you. I don't use Vegas for 3d work because a 3d app does a better job, each tool has it's strength. Ultimate S & Excalibur both have a slide show type thing which does just that, slideshows. You'd need to tweak anything else you wanted by hand.

I made a slideshow with their site (it IS free) and it looks like it's the same template used for everything and could be duplicated in vegas with tracks, etc. Would take work, but then you'd have a sweet looking template you could use.

Another vital element of a good slideshow is synching it to the sound track, whether it's music, dialogue, narration or any combination of them. The more you pay attention to stinging the cuts and moves, the better it all looks.

Tough to do without human intervention>

A program that I still use that is automated, but then can be manually tweaked in a whole lot of ways is Imaginate. I don't know if it is still available and it only does SD, but you can output to widescreen. Has keying framing for camera moves, scaling, position, etc.

Galen

> I also use "Ultimate S" from VAAST which allows creating Photo Montages easily, but it is pretty limited. I'd like to move beyond simple photo pan/zoom effects (Ken Burns).

Have you use MotoFoto in Ultimate S Pro? That will give you photos in motion in 6 directions. Have you use MotoFoto with PhotoMontage as a background? You can get some very interesting results from combining the two. Have you noticed that PhotoMontage allows you to place photos but not fill their duration? This allows you to build multiple tracks where photos are on and off the screen leaving wholes where other tracks can fill in? There are a lot of possibilities in Ultimate S Pro if you get away from wanting one button to do it all and start experimenting with multiple tracks of moving photos.

~jr

> Another vital element of a good slideshow is synching it to the sound track, whether it's music, dialogue, narration or any combination of them. The more you pay attention to stinging the cuts and moves, the better it all looks. Tough to do without human intervention>

Actually Ultimate S Pro has the ability to create slide shows that cut to the music without human intervention.

You can drop markers on the beats and then place photos at markers thus placing photos on the beat. This works especially well with royalty free music that has a fixed BPM. I demoed this at NAB 2008 using sports videos and VASST TrakPaks and I created a very compelling sports show opening segment in just a few seconds.

I'm hoping to make some tutorials of this to put on our web site as soon as I get some free time (famous last words... free time? what's that?)

~jr

to the comment above, animoto is fully automated and pretty quick. It samples your music and arranges photos to the beat fairly well. I was impressed the first time I saw one of their videos, but then every one of their videos look the same.

That sounds great. Though--not to split hairs--it's not always about hitting a beat. Timing a zoom or fade-in / out so it starts and stops with a short passage, for example, or a phrase from a narraton or lyric.

All that said, I'd love to see something that could save time.

That sounds great. Though--not to split hairs--it's not always about hitting a beat. Timing a zoom or fade-in / out so it starts and stops with a short passage, for example, or a phrase from a narraton or lyric.

I know *WE* care about such things, but 99% of the time you can throw a bunch of photos on the TL, use excal/untimate to do the fades/zooms/rotates, manually place a few photos (for specific parts & what not) and WHAM! a slide show everyone will love. i've done it many many many many times, nobody has ever been upset.

free time? what's that?)

All our time is free we just clog it up with all sorts of unnecessary stuff

Johhny thanks for the incite into Vasst look forward to seeing some stuff

Rory

I've seen a few 'automated' montages, and for the most part, they look that way. Automated.

There is usually no rhyme or reason to the zooming. It's always zoom out from the center, or zoom into the center. So you might start off with a nice photo of a person, then it may inexplicably zoom in on their chest (not good if it's a female).

All because the person was too lazy to go through the pics individually, and instead just applied a random zoom to all of them.

I just found this thread, because I'm creating slideshows as well. There is an incredible program I've used many times in the past when creating slideshows - family, Boy Scouts, and our school events - and people love the results. The sad thing is, it doesn't involve Vegas. However, I may buy the upgrade because it may work well with Vegas now.

The program is MemoriesOnTV, and what's great is that it is automated, but provides a lot of power and flexibility. For example, you can preset what kinds of transitions to use, how long pictures should display, how long transitions should take, and which Ken Burns effects you want (pan, zoom, both, neither).

After it creates the slideshow (and of course, you can choose music to include), you're free to go and customize any particular photo and/or transition. Maybe you want a particular picture to have three movements rather than one - perhaps zoom and pan to the right, pause, and then zoom out to see the whole, while panning in some other direction.

And its so simple to use.

Unfortunately, while I still use it (in fact, I recently created several slideshows of our Philmont trip), I've really wanted even more power, and want a way to get it into Vegas.

Well, the new version now allows the user to render each slideshow to mpg2 or avi, rather than rendering the whole movie as one mpg2 file. This way, I can render avi files to pull into Vegas Pro, where I can do PiP and other things I want (you can do PiP in MOTV, but again, I want even more flexibility).

Anyway, I may buy the upgrade, and I can strongly recommend this program. Again, it's called MemoriesOnTV, and the web site is codejam.com (I hope it's ok to say that here? If not, someone tell me, and I'll remove it).

And no, I don't work for them, I just like telling others about good software. I also push Vegas Pro, and I used to push CCE back when I used Nero and had to encode my videos outside the program.

No automated process is ever going to create a slideshow with the same emotive effect as a skillful human. It's one of the areas where humans have a huge lead. Of course you can just drop images into some template, maybe even have transition points determined by a beat-detector on the soundtrack, but it's still not going to have that human edge. And the more "emotional" the scene, the more vital is the human part in creation.

I'd also *never* use one of these online services. Two reasons:
1) They usually want a monthly fee (as does Animoto)
2) You have to look very closely at the licensing terms. And when you do, you'll usually find something like this (taken from Animoto):

" You hereby grant to Animoto a royalty-free, perpetual license to use, copy, create, modify, display and host your Animoto Video, Image Content, and Musical Content "

check out ultimate s or Excalibur. Both do what you want right inside vegas. but that other software may have some touches that are better (don't know, never used).

but each tool has it's uses. :D don't forget you can use blender (or other 3d app) to do slideshows too:

(Sorry to hijack the thread here guys but dogwalker has the email option disabled in his profile...)

dogwalker -- I noticed your mention of Philmont. I went for my second time this summer. I have a few videos on YouTube, mainly from my first trip in 2006, but a couple of short ones from this year: http://www.youtube.com/user/timlan635

Send me an email through my profile if you want to share any of your experiences. (But warning: doing so will expose your actual email address to me!)

Or, if you have any of your slideshows online it wouldn't be out of line to post a link here, since this thread is about slide shows...

The MemoriesOnTV program does look interesting.

(and now back to our regularly scheduled forum thread...)

Whoa, nice work, Tim! Heck man, you just made me realize I have to redo mine! I love your title screen. I'll send you a link to our photos, since I don't have youtube videos up. I wish we had shot actual video. Sigh.

Tim, I hadn't even thought of creating videos for youtube. I made dvds for everyone in our crew. After reading your email, I've enabled email on my account (hadn't thought of that before, either).

I have the previous version of MOTV, and it only renders the final movie and/or burns to dvds, so I think I will upgrade (the upgrade price is cheap), and I'm still curious about rendering to avi instead and then using Vegas.

Anyway, that's still a ways off. Meanwhile, I'll definitely touch base with you about Philmont. We had a blast! Everyone in our crew climbed the Tooth of Time that last morning. I wasn't a scout as a youth, so I'm enjoying it through my sons. :-)

I been Beta testing Animoto fora while now..

personally with the composting within Animoto, and rendering.. I would say pay the 300bux and get a corporate account

Sure its nto as tweakable or customisable, but by the time the slideshows over, people wont care.. trust me..

Ive been asking Animoto to release the app as a standalone with tweak options.. not much luck, but maybe one day...