DVD Slideshow w/ Multiple Background Music

[carbfrze]

Hello all,
I'm in the process of making a Christmas DVD for my family using alot of old pictures that I've scanned in. I was using Windows Movie Maker in WinXP but unfortunately this stretches all of the photos no matter what size they are to fullscreen and it distorts them. I know that I could edit every single photo all over again and just add a transparent background but that is alot more work than I want to do considering I have over 600 pictures scanned in.
I tried out DVD Slideshow GUI and really like all the easy features but unfortunately, I'd like to add numerous songs to be playing in the background during the slideshow. And for some reason when I go to add a second Background Music song it changes the music over to the same song throughout the slideshow.
Does anyone know of a way that I can add numerous songs in DVD Slideshow GUI or is there another program out there that would work better?
Here's my system info:
WinXP
Pentium 4/2.6GHZ
1GB of RAM
120 GB HD / 50GB Free
Please let me know if anybody has any suggestions.
Thanks
Marc

[borax]

Seperate the video (DVD Slideshow GUI) and audio (Audocity/Besweet/Aften) handling. If you have finished your Slideshow save/encode it to a m2v file and join your songs (also with cross fade effects or similar) with an audio editor and encode it to an ac3 file with a suitable duration. Put the two together with an authoring program.

[carbfrze]

Thanks for the reply.
Any idea what authoring program would be best to combine the slideshow and music?
Thanks again.

[t0nee1]

@carbfrze, hint see borax sig for authoring proggie.....just to name one....

[tin2tin]

Dvd slideshow GUI only takes one audio file. You can use Audacity or MediaJoin to join several pieces of music into one, which the can be added to DSG.

If you want to add exact music on exact spots in the slideshow you can export to avi and use that file to sync the musc to in DubIt and then export a wav soundtrack, which then can be imported into DSG and used for your dvd slideshow.

Unless you have a lot of ram 600 images might be too many(depending on the image res and your ram) for DSG to process(you can allways give it a try). Else render the slideshow out in parts and use MediaJoin to join it into a whole.

If you're going to use Gui for Dvdauthor then I would recommend you to use the .gfd export from DVD slideshow GUI, as an easy way to make a cool looking DVD with menus and everything.

All the software mentioned here are free.

[carbfrze]

Hello,
Thanks everyone for their input. I've decided to use DVD Slideshow GUI. Unfortunately for some reason I cannot get the amount of time that each photo is up to be correct. I've tried extending the duration on the main screen for each photo but it seems that some photos are only up for a couple of seconds and then some others are up for much longer than the duration. I thought it may have been my PC running a little slow, but it does it even after I burn the slideshow to DVD and watch it on my DVD player. Anybody have any ideas?
Thanks
Marc

[tin2tin]

Duration is the length a slide is visible without transition. It's in frames. If you're making a NTSC slideshow then it runs with 29.97 frames pr. sec.
Exposition is the length in frames of the transition.

Make sure that the duration and exposition values are set as you want them.

[snafubaby]

Duration is the length a slide is visible without transition. It's in frames. If you're making a NTSC slideshow then it runs with 29.97 frames pr. sec.
Exposition is the length in frames of the transition.

Make sure that the duration and exposition values are set as you want them.

someone wanna clarify this? maybe give me an example of what the differences are? I'm also stuck on DSG and these two parameters. thanks!