Crop/resize/add borders to JPG files

[csaag]

Goal is to take a series of pictures from a digital camera and make a NTSC DVD slideshow to play on a fullframe TV.

According to an article here:
http://www.uwasa.fi/~f76998/video/conversion/

I should take my original pictures, crop them to a 4:3 ratio, resize them to 704x480, then add 8 pixels of black border to each side to make it 720x480.

So I'm trying to find a way to do all that.

Cropping is easy enough, although time consuming but I don't want to crop each picture at the same place so I think I'm stuck here cropping each photo seperately. I downloaded Irfanview which makes batch resampling to any size easy (Under advanced options, check resize & enter the desired size and also check the resample box)

So now I have a bunch of 704x480 JPG files. Now how do I make them 720x480 with 8 pixels of black borders on each size? Any way to do it with an automatic process rather than edit each picture individually?

[daamon]

Check out Slide Show Movie Maker. I've not used, but have seen loads of people recommending it and very happy with the results.

I'm guessing that it's a case of "Load JPGs" -> "Buil Slideshow" -> "Get output".

Go for an AVI output which can then be encoded using your chosen MPEG2 encoder.

[housepig]

you could do it with Photoshop - open the first picture and record your actions, then run that action as a batch process on the folder containing all the rest of the pics.

[csaag]

Thanks, will look into it, but I'm trying to get the photos in the right resolution before putting them into a slide show program. Found out the hard way that not every program does a good job with resizing which is why I'm trying to do it myself.

[csaag]

To close this out, here's what I did to be able to do this:

I individually cropped my photos to a 4:3 ratio and used (freeware) Irfanview to batch resample all of them to 704x480.

I was able to use the following AviSynth script within Vdub to update a series of JPG files (named name (0).jpg, name (1).jpg etc) :

ImageSource("d:\TEMP\name (%d).jpg",0,10)
AddBorders(8,0,8,0)
ImageWriter("d:\TEMP\",type="jpg")

the 0,10 represents name (0).jpg thru name (10).jpg
This created files 000000.jpg thru 000010.jpg after I chose 'preview output from start' in Vdub.

The above script padded them out to 720x480

[midnightsun]

This is ok, the only thing is that you're slightly distorting the image proportions, since the 4:3frame you cropped was resized to 704x480, but you're actually authoring at 720x480. You're shrinking horizontally by some 2%. If you intend to keep the 8pxl padding left and right, to preserve the proportions you would have to crop the orignals to a 1.304-width-to-height frame.

I hope this was clear enough