photo vcd w/transitions?

[klumbz]

I want to put together a video photo album w/transitions between each photo like fading pic 1 into pic2 ect...

any ideas?

thx
klumbz

[ThighMaster]

It's possible... but it will take a bit of work.

Transitions can be of two types; A hardcoded animation or a slideshow app using transition effects. The latter is not possible for VCD. The only option would be to render the transition using a video editing program (like Adobe Premiere) to create hardcoded animations for the transition effects and also the images. The only drawback is that the images cannot be high res (you can use high res but it will look a bit weird)

If you were using high res images you will have to author your VCD structure to look something like this.

[IMG][TR. ANIM][IMG][TR. ANIM]... and so on.

and if you use one long video then all the work will be done in the Video Editing Software.

OR

you could do this: make an MPEG for each pair of images with the transition. the frames would look something like this; S = start frame, T = transition frames, E = end frame
[STTTTTE]
and the authored VCD structure (using chaptering with VCDImager)would look like this;
[STTTTTE][PAUSE][STTTTTE][PAUSE]... and so on.
This way the video will pause at the E frame which would be the intended image, and the S frame of the next set would be the E frame of the previous set.

Hope you get what I'm trying to explain here. Also any project like this would be best acheived using VCD Imager or similar authoring software.

Cheers,
ThighMaster

[Steve_h]

I use Ulead Video Studio 4 to do this and it does a good job. There are a large variety of transition effects available and the time can be set for each one. You also have the option of adding some video clips instead of just a series of JPEG's. This program also allows for background music or narration to be added to the slideshow. Personally I prefer to output to SVCD for higher res.

[House de Kris]

Actually, I've been working on a similar project myself. How I decided to approach this task was to make an MPEG of all the photos with transitions, then burn as a typical VCD. The biggest problem is that the photos start out as 1600x1200, which is a bit more resolution than VCD's 352x240. The best solution I could come up with for keeping the visual impact of the original picture while presenting some of the detail contained within, was to do a lot of zooming. For example, I show the original picture in it's entirety for a few seconds, then zoom into an area that needs detail, then fade to a zoomed section of another picture and then zoom out to its complete framing, fade to another picture and zoom in, etc, etc. I chose the zoom in/zoom out method to avoid a constant zoom in zoom in zoom in effect.

I gotta tell you though, this is a ton of work. I will never do it like this again. The results are great and have a lot a 'movement' from still pictures, but it really takes a long time to create a disc this way. Oh yeah, also panning around while zoomed in allows viewing of details of greater areas.

I'm doing all of this in Video Factory, but Premiere or other editors could do the same thing.

[mrbass]

352x240 blah...that sucks. That's why you should use Ulead DVD Picture Show with VCD 2.0 stills. NTSC: 704x480, PAL: 704x576 You can include mp3 bg music..just minus the transitions.
see Q10 of the FAQ http://www.ulead.com/dps/faq1.htm

btw anyone see that Microsoft Infommercial about the MS pictureview device. It's 4 payments of $39.95 = $160.You store like 25 photos on a stupid floppy.
Let's see I put over 5,000 photos on 3cds. 1900 photos max per cd (VCD 2.0 spec limitation).

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: mrbass on 2001-11-28 13:48:17 ]</font>