This may be in the wrong spot, so mods move it if it is...

Just to head off the flames, I have used VCDEasy to make slideshows and it works great. Still using ver 1.1. But there is one thing I (actually I was asked) wanted to do was to add a background image. Kind of a theme thing to tie the menus, pics, and subject of the show together.

The images I've used are simple landscapes, park entrances, and such that have been blurred. These backgounds go over very well.

The problem comes in compositing 1900 pictures with backgrounds and making thumbnail menus for each of the shows. I have a "play slideshow" or "select image" menu too.

The answer came to me one day while looking at a web server: ImageMagick and a script to send it pictures to process!!! (Links at the end of the post)

The script has mutated several times to add different things I needed to do. Anybody who can use AVISynth can easily modify this script.

A few notes to make best use of this script:
1. ImageMagick needs to be installed on the C drive. If not then the path name needs to be changed in the script (replace "C:\ImageMagick" with "drive:\path_to_exe_file"
2. You should create a project folder, such as D:\Project
3. Create sub-folder with the copies of the images, such as Jo_b-day, Mike_b-day, trip_FL ...
4. Don't use spaces in the names of the folders or images. Spaces and window's shell
commands don't work.
5. copy the script into your project folder
6. Drag each folder over the top of the script.
7. Fill in the answers.

The output of the script will be a montage.avs file, menu*.bmp, temp*.bmp, and imagename.bmp. You can delete the temp files. Win2k has issues with file deletion in VB scripts.

The menus with have 8 thumbnails in the "title safe" area. You will need to add titles and buttons using a photo editor (for VCD) or a DVD authoring program.

The montage.avs can be tweaked if needed. Use your favorite encoder to encode.

The imagename.bmp and menu*.bmp files can used directly by authoring programs such as VCDEasy and DVDLab.

ImageMagick can be found at http://www.imagemagick.org
My script can be downloaded from http://home.earthlink.net/~mike.chris/slide_montage.zip
Example of my backgounds can be found here http://home.earthlink.net/~mike.chris/bkgnd.zip
AVISynth is at http://www.avisynth.org

Please excuse the mess in the script. I wrote it on the fly.

Any question, comment, or suggestions?

Mike