iPhoto slideshow with soundtrack to SVCD...Long journey?

[thebanks]

I have spent quite a lot of time lately trying to find a solution that seem to me redily at hand for WIndows users. THis comes as a bit of an odd situation for a devoted Mac user for many years. I have a friend that can burn SVCD on his laptop with a nice high resolution slideshow with his favorite songs and automatically time the slides to the music selected and it looks and sounds great (Photodex Proshow Gold). SO... I thought this must be a snap on a Mac. I bought Toast titanium, made my slide show with one song on iPhoto (first disappointment) exported to MPEG 1 Quicktime mov. and burned in VCD mode in TOast. The resolution went all to hell. I have learned that MPEG 1 is no good for stills. Toast does not have the capability to do SVCD which, I understand would be much better. I also gather that unless I can author in MPEG-2 than I cannot expect to preserve the resolution before I burn in Toast. I have read about a solution on this forum that involves seven applications: Virtual PC, TMPGEnc, GraphicConverter 4.0, Toast, Q.T., VCDimagerGUI, and Fireburner, and it I was not sure from reading it if audio was included in the solution.

I can hardly believe that ROxio makes a WIndows program that will burn SVCD with audio (Photosuite 5) and Toast can't! Roxio was no help with my 90 days of technical support that came with Toast.

I guess there is a solution that involves aftermarket DVD burner and software that might provide a solution for my B&W G3 400, but I am not up to that yet and may have to upgrade in a year or so. In the mean time I would at least be able to do what the WIndows users can do now easily and cheaply!

Is anyone using Virtual PC with a windows program like Photosuite 5 or ProShow Gold with success on their Mac?

A decent slideshow to view on a compatible DVD player with sound does not seem too much to ask, does it Steve Jobs!!!???

[major]

There are 3 great slideshow apps available for OSX: VCDBuilder, DVD PictureShow and MissingMpegSlideshow. All available through versiontracker.com

[thebanks1]

I checked out DVD Picture Show. That is just what I have been looking for except that I found it is designed exclusively for Windows. Missingmpegslideshow won't work yet, I am still trying to figure out where the tools folder is that i am suppose to put a utility that i download into.

VCD builder has no audio capability that i know of.

Please let me know if anyone has a simple solution to this problem.


Thanks

[TugBoat]

Time to Check again! While you weren't watchin';
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/19242
This looks good, I'm thinking about it myself!

[addicttomacs]

I've been looking to do this for over two years (create a picture vcd/svcd, etc) and for my needs, creating a slideshow on either Powerpoint X or iPhoto, adding music, and then converting with quicktime or exporting from either program to VCD results in two things: 1) lousy picture res and 2) NO TRANSITIONS. Does anyone know if this Ulead DVD software for the Mac does transitions and preserves them? I've tried everything...including exporting from Cleaner 5 and 6 and I still get the same results....lousy pic res and transitions that were there in the .mov file are erased. Without using anything PC (VirtualPC, etc), does anyone know how to do a pic CD that preserves transitions?

Thanks....
addicttomac

[digitaldave]

There's a similar thread going on this. I tried to make a slideshow in iPhoto with music and was quite successful.

https://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=141249

[addicttomacs]

digitaldave,

Thanks for the link...I've seen that thread and tried fooling with ffmpegx a bit but I suppose I have no idea what I'm doing so I couldn't get it to work with the trasitions. In short, no matter what I do to convert to an mpg, the transitions get lost. Did you have any luck converting and preserving the transitions?

Thanks for any info,

addicttomacs

[SCB]

To help out a friend for a Christmas present I put a slideshow together for her in iMove. It looked great with transitions, zooms in/out, titles, music, etc. I wanted to put it on SVCD so all I did was export the movie to DV in iMove and converted it to an SVCD in ffmpegX. Burnt with Toast. Simple as that.

[digitaldave]

digitaldave,

Thanks for the link...I've seen that thread and tried fooling with ffmpegx a bit but I suppose I have no idea what I'm doing so I couldn't get it to work with the trasitions. In short, no matter what I do to convert to an mpg, the transitions get lost. Did you have any luck converting and preserving the transitions?

Thanks for any info,

addicttomacs

Slideshow transistions from iPhoto completely intact.

iPhoto 2.0.

Perhaps reread my "tutorial" on the iPhoto to SCVD technique. Let me know if you have any questions from there. I've only been fooling with ffmpegx for a couple days and it's best to ignore a majority of the settings (greek to me) and just change the ones I mention. (Just ignore my ignorance in the post about image size in the Preset)