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  1. 35 MM Slides to SVCD Slide Show, NTSC format

    This project uses 35 MM slides and converts them to a SVCD slide show. 426 slides fit on one CD for viewing on a television. Start at step 4 if you wish to create a slide show of your digital images - no slide scanner needed.

    Tools:

    Nikon CoolScan 4000 film Scanner
    Nikon CoolScan SF-200 batch slide feeder attachment
    Nikon Scan 3.1 software
    Adobe Photoshop 6.0
    IrfanView, freeware, http://fileforum.betanews.com
    Slide Show Movie Maker, freeware, http://www.joern-thiemann.de/tools/index.html
    DivX codec, freeware,http://www.divx.com/
    TMPGenc,freeware, http://www.tmpgenc.net/
    TMPGenc VFAPI plug-in
    NERO, http://www.nero.com
    NERO MPEG-2/SVCD Plug-in, http://www.nero.com
    Standalone DVD / SVCD player, APEX 1500 DVD player
    Television
    Windows PC with fast processor, fast hard drives and lots of hard drive space.

    Steps

    1. Create a directory on your PC for your slide project. I create 4 directories: the Slide Project directory and three sub-directories: TIFF, BMP, MOVIE

    2. Scan slides using the batch attachment to the film scanner. I use the 'digital ice' feature to remove dust and scratches. All other settings are default. Store the .TIFF images in your TIFF directory on your PC. Each image is about 65 MB.

    3. Using PhotoShop, or your favorite image editor, adjust the orientation and image quality for each slide. I use the auto-levels and curves features to adjust color and brightness.

    4. Open IrfanView.
    a. Select the batch conversion/rename option. The batch conversion/rename screen displays.

    b. Using the 'Look in' drop-down box, navigate to the directory containing your TIFF files. Highlight the files you want to convert. Select the 'Add' button to add them to the 'Input Files' box.

    c. Click the 'Browse' button, next to the output directory, and enter the path to your BMP directory. Select the 'Advanced Options' button. The advanced options screen displays.

    d. These are the settings I use for TV viewing: 640 pixels wide by 480 pixels high, check 'Preserve Aspect Ratio' (so your image is not distorted) check 'Use Resample function', use a color depth of '16.7 million colors', and enter the X & Y DPI to be 1200 x 1200. I have also used a DPI of 600 x 600 with good results.

    e. Click on the OK button to save the 'Advanced Options' settings and return to the Batch conversion/rename screen. Click the 'Start' button next to the file list box. IrfanView will quickly process each image and store the converted .BMP file in the output directory you specified. The progress of the conversion is displayed.

    f. Now you have a set of .BMP files that are ready to be put in an .AVI file.

    5. Open Slide Show Movie Maker. From the main menu select 'Project', then select 'Project Settings'.

    6. Click on the 'Choose Output AVI' button and enter the path to your MOVIE directory. You can also change other settings for your movie. I change the 'Frames per second' setting to '30' for USA TV. See the SMM user manual for information on each setting. Click OK to return to the main screen of SMM.

    7. From the main menu select 'Objects' then 'Add Pictures'. A file manager window will display. Navigate to your BMP directory. Select the files to be added to your movie and click on 'Open'. The images will be added to your movie.

    8. From here you can assign fade effects and text effects to your slide show. Click on the 'Select all' button, this will highlight all of the images in your movie. Then, from the fade effects drop-down menu, select the fade effect you wish to use in your movie. Click on the 'update' button. This causes every image in your slide show to have the same fade effect.

    9. You can also have text display with each image in your slide show. Use the text settings buttons to position and adjust the text. The filename of your image is the default text.

    10. Click on the 'Start Creation' button. You will be asked to enter a codec for the movie creation and for the audio creation. I use DivX 4.11 for the movie and the default PCM for the audio. SSMM does not come with DivX. If you do not have DivX already installed on your system, then you can download and install it for free.

    11. Click on the 'Start creation' button. The SSMM main screen will show the progress of the .AVI file creation.

    12. Now, we need to use TMPGEnc to encode the .AVI file to an MPEG2 file. I am not a TMPGEnc expert and do not pretend to understand all TMPGEnc settings. The settings I outline give high quality SVCD output for me. You need to download and install from scratch a new version every 30 days if you want to use the MPEG2 encoder.

    13. Open TMPGEnc. Close the project wizard. Click on the 'Load' button. Load the SuperVideoCD (NTSC).mcf template. Click on 'Open'.

    14. Click on the 'Settings' button. On the video tab make the following setting changes: Rate control mode: 2-pass VBR (VBR), Motion search precision: Highest quality (very slow).

    15. On the Advanced tab make these settings:
    Source aspect ration: 1:1 (VGA), Full screen (keep aspect ratio), Ghost reduction, Noise reduction.

    16. On the Quantize matrix tab: 'Output YUV data as Basic YcbCr ', 'Soften block noise'.

    17. Click the 'OK' button to return to the main screen. Click on the Video Source button and enter the name of the .AVI file you created with SSMM. Click on the Output filename and enter your MOVIE output directory. Click on 'Start' to engage the MPEG2 creation. With the settings we made above, the encoding will take a long time. It takes my machine about 2 hours for a 12-minute movie with 140 slides showing 5 seconds each.

    18. Once your MPEG2 file is created, you can burn it to a CD-ROM using NERO. You will need to purchase and install the NERO MPEG2 decoder to burn an SVCD. Open NERO, select SVCD from the project menu, select new and add your .MPG files to the track list. You can use the 'File', 'Compilation info' menu to change the volume name, create a menu for your slide show tracks, change the WRITE parameters and so on.

    19. Enjoy watching your slide show movie on the APEX 1500 CD player and your favorite television set.
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  2. Member
    Join Date
    Feb 2002
    Location
    England
    Search PM
    Thanks for this. You have pointed us in the direction of some interesting software.

    Just a couple of points:
    Firstly, I don't think you should need the Nero MPEG2 plugin, provided that your TMPGEnc settings are producing a compliant SVCD stream. Any recent version of Nero should be able to create an SVCD from compliant MPG files.

    As far as I understand, the Nero MPEG2 plugin is just another MPEG2 encoder. It would only be needed if your TMPGEnc produced MPGs were non-compliant, in which case Nero would re-encode the file for a second time. In this case, the best course of action would be to correct the non-compliance in TMPGEnc. In fact if you really wanted to use the Nero plugin, it would be capable of encoding directly from the AVI file

    Secondly, to avoid quality loss in the intermediate AVI file, have you considered using the HuffYUV codec, which is lossless? This is available from
    http://www.math.berkeley.edu/~benrg/index.html

    The technique you have suggested uses two lossy compression methods, which may result in more artifacts than using HuffYUV for the intermediate step. Of course the downside is the extra disc space you would need. You could minimise this by encoding a number of smaller files, one at a time. Nero will happily copy all the files on to one SVCD.
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  3. I tried the HuffYUV codec; the Problem is the file size, which is > 4GB for a 15 min slide show.
    SSMM writes the file until the 4 GB border, and makes no warning.
    The encoder cannot read the created file, it is also not possible to view the .avi with media player, because the output file is corrupted.
    Same happens with the Intel IYUV codec.
    It would be nice to find a codec for compression which makes none or little loss of quality. Has anybody a suggestion ? On the other hand, the quality with DIVX as intermediate format is really good.

    I created the SVCD with WinOnCD 3.8; it works fine on my DVD Player (Tevion 2100)
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  4. I've been creating VCD's of video from divx using tmpgenc for a while now and thought I understood what what was going on. I have followed instructions on how to make a slide show avi using irfan and slide show maker exactly as you have directed. I can play the avi file no problem in windows media player.
    My problem occurs when I want to convert the slide show .avi to mpg for burning. I know your directions say to encode it to mpeg-2, but I am trying to encode it to mpg 1 for burning on a regular vcd. The reason for this is that I am using Roxio video cd creator to burn the video cd's. All that tmpgenc produces is a video file of black screens, it doesn't even pick up the music.
    What I don't understand is why the conversion doesn't occur correctly. It looks like the avi file is a movie made up of the same frame repeated for the 5 seconds of each slide show. My understanding is that once I have a file as an avi movie (using divx 5), it should be able to convert the avi stream to an mpg-1 without any problem. What makes this avi stream different from any other video avi stream??? Any help would be appreciated.
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  5. Just some thoughts. I have been converting 35mm slides to DVD for sometime now and will continue to sometime in the future with about 10,000 35 mm slides alone dating back to 1950s. I use a Nikon CoolScan 8000 and also include 2 1/4 x 2 1/4 (120 & 220) both positive (slides) and negatives of all formats. I also use Digital Ice for surface blemishes and Digital ROC to restore faded color and/or color cast on old slides. If you are archiving old pictures you can scan b&w negatives and old prints and include them in your slide show. I also save the jpeg (tiff etc) files of the photos in the slide show on the same disk with the slide show. It is handy if you want to make a print from a slide in the show at a later date. Personally I prefer not to mpeg encode the photos and am willing to give up the special effects. I use DVD WorkShop.
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