How to burn a DVD slideshow using personal photographs?

[harpe025]

Hey all, I hope this is the right forum. Anyway, I'm taking a trip to Vegas next month and I'd like to put together a slideshow type presentation that you see people doing with videotapes (and DVDs more these days) with the pics from my digital camera. I see Microsoft has Plus! Digital Edition which has a built in feature for that. However, is there an easy way to do it in Premiere or is that too complicated an app for a simple project such as this? If not, does anyone have a tutorial or know where I can view one online? Basically, I want to transition between pics with my own narrative and then shoot it out to an MPEG format to burn to DVD.

[nomads]

Look under Tools and then click on DVD/VCD Picture. This should be a good start.

[MOVIEGEEK]

I recommend Ulead VideoStudio or Pinnacle Studio ,I haven't tried Memoriesontv but many like it.A free way of making a slideshow would be to use Windows Movie Maker 2 and then TMPGenc to convert.

[racer-x]

I use Premiere for all my slideshows with excellent results. Go here:
http://www.wrigleyvideo.com/videotutorial/tutorials.htm for some nice tutorials. Download the "Montage to Music" tutorial.

Remember, if your making NTSC DVDs, crop your images to 720x534.

[Lula1]

Hi racer-x,

Remember, if your making NTSC DVDs, crop your images to 720x534.

Can you expand on that subject ? I thought it should be something like 4:3 aspect ratio, such as 800x600 or 768x576 .

Thank's .

[lgh529]

DVD NTSC resolution is 720x480, but the pixels are square, and the pixels on your digital camera are rectangle (I may have that backwards). Anyway, when you import still pictures at 720x534, it translates into 720x480 which is full DVD resolution. If you don't resize the pictures, then your editor will resize it for you, and you may not like it was well.

[harpe025]

DVD NTSC resolution is 720x480, but the pixels are square, and the pixels on your digital camera are rectangle (I may have that backwards). Anyway, when you import still pictures at 720x534, it translates into 720x480 which is full DVD resolution. If you don't resize the pictures, then your editor will resize it for you, and you may not like it was well.

Are you sure you don't have the sizes backwards? I thought LordSMurf told me to create a picture (for a DVD menu) in Photoshop with a 720 X 540 resolution and then SAVE it as 720 X 480. Then it would show up correctly in the editing program. So if I extrapolate, then I should work with all the pictures I'm going to put in the slideshow at 720 X 540 and then when I have them like I want them, save them all as 720 X 480. then, when I work with them in a DVD burning program or video editior, they will show correctly without any pixelization. Is this right?

[MOVIEGEEK]

I convert all my stills to 768x576 and 72dpi if I'm making a slideshow or menu.When I play raw JPEG's on my standalones that size looks the best(ie. filling the entire screen without distortion),also Ulead recommends that size for stills.If you mix stills with video then you should use 720x480(NTSC).

[racer-x]

Let me explain this as simple as I can.

I only work with NTSC so I don't know the correct resolution for PAL. NTSC DVD is 720x480. When that dvd is played back on the TV, it is 640x480, wich is 4:3 AR. Now if you want to put a picture in video and save it as 720x480, it will become squashed horizontaly to 640x480 when viewed on a TV. This will distort the picture.

You want your pictures to be 4:3 before you import them into your video editor. That means 640x480 or 720x540 should be fine for most video editors. I would choose 720x540 because it's a higher resolution. As soon as you import the images into the Timeline, your video editor will shrink it verticaly to 720x480. But remember that when you view it on the TV, it will become 640x480 and back to 4:3 AR.

Now for the tricky part. If you use Premiere, they recomend you crop your images to 720x534. This is because the pixels on your images are square, but Premiere uses .9 pixels. Trust me, use 720x534 if you use Premiere and your images will display correctly.

[DaveS]

if you want to try something easy, just download the demo of memories on tv and put in your pics as is & let it do you a slide show on re-writable.

some people like proshow gold as well although I haven't tried it. MOT did nice results (although I authored on something else b/c their author interface is clunky at best (but transitions are good & rendering was good for me too)).

Of course you can spend time resizing, etc. but MOT did well w/o that. If you want to try something w/o spending a lot of time first, that gets my (2c) vote.

[Lula1]

Hi again,

To those that use MOT :

1 - Is there any way to change the settings for encoding with TMPGEnc ?

2 - Regarding the TV set overscan, is there any way to define a "Title Safe Area" like can be done with DVDLab ? My pictures are being cut on sides and text titles on the top .

3 - Is there an anti-flicker option ? Some other slideshow software carry this. I am not experiencing flicker on pictures, but it is clearly noticeable on vertical line of thumbnails of menus suplied with MOT.

4 - As for the menu templates, is there a way to add aditional frames on a menu , or to move the navigation buttons or navigation text ( forward, backward , previous, next ) on the menu ?

[theDruid]

Hi,

there are lots of guide on how to do this sort of thing here.

In fact, I think there was a new guide which looked pretty good posted this week for MemoriesOnTV...

... this one: https://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=189358

cheers,
mcdruid.