Which Slide show program to use ?

[Slide Woman]

Newbie .... Been using Easy CD Creator Plat. for VCD, husband says transitions not professional enough for him. I just bought Magix in order to be able to write to DVD, don't care for program and their transitions are a joke. Any experience/suggestions on other slide show programs to write to CD or DVD ? DVD Video Suite 4 or ULead DVD Picture Show ? Thanks, Jean

[hwoodwar]

As far as ULead DVD Picture Show there is a 14-day trial copy available at: http://www.ulead.com/dps/trial.htm . Try it and see if he likes it. I tried it a long time ago but I don't remember that much about it. It is easy to use and I believe you can have up to 99 menu icons with up to 99 images associated with each. I didn't really mess around with the transitions much.

[G-man]

Slide show pgms come in 2 basic flavors:

1) Fancy transitions, which means that they create a video of the images, losing resolution in the process (352x240).

2) Simple transitions, but good resolution even on a VCD (704x480) for still pictures.

Ulead DVD Picture Show has only a simple transition, but is Very easy to use and creates high quality (resolution) results. (And it's cheap).

[kentschu]

But PictureShow doesn't allow you to incorporate video clips in with the stills, does it?
I'm willing to give up transitions in order to have the better photo quality, but I really want to combine the video clips with my pictures from my digital camera...

Kent

[SingSing]

Nero can create a playable VCD with still.
The question I have is wether all playable VCD converts
the picture into Video quality stills ? Thus lose the original resolution ?

[MOVIEGEEK]

Ulead MovieFactory allows video and still photo integration.Nero is also simple(no transitions)but makes 704x480(NTSC)stills.

[kentschu]

I just tried MovieFactory demo and I couldn't get it to incorporate stills at all. Are you sure it can do that? And even if it can, does it keep them as stills or does it convert them to lower quality video instead of higher quality stills?

Kent

[SingSing]

Ulead MovieFactory allows video and still photo integration.Nero is also simple(no transitions)but makes 704x480(NTSC)stills.

So nero took the original jpeg and convert it into a 0.338 megabit picture.
I will say it is respectable since 1.3meg digi-cam is 1280x1024 and 2 megcam is 1600 x 1280.

But Jpeg is also quality sensitive ( like CQ ), therefore if Nero pick a different compression ratio (5), then the picture reproduce on a prinetr or computer going to have distortion around the subject's face !

[MOVIEGEEK]

Anytime you make a VCD from photos you will lose some quality,but IMHO Ulead DVDPictureShow produces the best photo cd because it
has "flicker" removal,better menu templates and allows .mp3 or .wav audio.

[mustang581]

I do not have much experience creating vcd's but I have succesfully created a vcd slide show (no transitions) with background music and I was also able to incorporate some video clips on to the cd using Winoncd 5.0 -- picture resolution was 704x480 video is standard vcd 352x240. the pictures play great on my dvd but the video is so so..
purchase price for winoncd is around $40.00
Al

[kentschu]

WinOnCD sounds perfect.
However, do you know if there is a demo version available so that I can be sure?
Also, when you create photo albums with background music - can the background audio track span across the stills and video clips? In other words, start showing still#1 while playing song abc.mp3, then shows still#2, then video clip #1, then still#3 - all the time continually playing abc.mp3 audio in the background...???
Thanks.

Kent

P.S. Does anyone know if this capability can be done by any freeware programs? If not, no big deal, $40 isn't too bad for WinonCD if it really works as well as it sounds.

[mustang581]

I think my anwser before was a little misleading when I said I was able to incorporate stills with video, what I do have is a vcd that is menu driven, within a particular option I can have stills as a slide show or a video clip but not both. the way the audio works is, if I have 20 pictures and I want to span over 1 minute then I make my audio track 1 minute using some audio editor, and the stills will display for about 3 seconds each. I don't think there is a demo available.
Al

[kentschu]

OK. Thanks for the clarification. That's not too awful.
Can you add multiple video clips to a single slide show? Or does each video clip become a separate slide show?

Is there a limit to the number of stills you can have in a single slide show?

Kent

[mustang581]

I hope this helps, when I created my project in Winoncd I had one main menu and two submenus with 4 options each, I have about 150 pictures through out the 8 different options, each selection is its own separate slide show that when it finishes it goes back to the menu or I can choose to move on to the next set of pictures if I wanted (one or the other probably not both). I'm sure I could add more pictures but I do not know the limits at this point. winoncd is a cd recording software with many features for authoring vcd's.

Al

[mustang581]

the following is a link to winoncd 3.8 (still very similar in ver. 5.0) guide for creating a vcd. this will give you and idea of how you can create a vcd with menus, slide shows, and video clips.

http://www.coyote01.freeserve.co.uk/menu_creation.htm

[Slide Woman]

I've been advised that you can't use Nero and EZCD, due to conflict, and I won't do with out my EZED, at this point.

Jean

[mdm]

Slide Woman:

The Nero/EZCD conflict is not a fact. I currently have the following installed and working:

Nero
EZCD 5 Plat.
CDRWin
CloneCD
BlindWrite
ClicknBurn Pro
DiscJuggler

They have all worked in Win98, WinNT and WinXP without any special configuration.

[Slide Woman]

I have a good friend that says he had a conflict. He and I are both using Win ME, maybe that is the difference.

BTW - I'm a newbie here so bear with me

Can I put more than 99 images in a slide show onto a CD ? If not, can I do multipule sessions ?

What has anyone heard about the latest EZCD 5.3 DVD Edition, if so what ?

Thanks, Jean

[mdm]

WinME *could* be the problem, but I doubt it. I think it's how they are installed and what options are installed. I've been hearing about conflicts for some time now, but I have all these apps running on multiple machines and have not experienced any problems.

With PictureShow I believe you can have 99 slide shows with 99 pictures each on a CD. On a DVD one of those limitations is removed (I forgot which one). Although it doesn't have fancy transitions, the rest of the features are nice.

I rarely use EZCD so I can't comment on that (the last version I liked was 4 - there is more fluff than function now IMHO).

[Slide Woman]

I downloaded the trial version of Ulead Picture Show ... really easy to use but only showed me one transition and then discovered that the program will only write to a DVD -R. I have a Sony DRU120 +R/+RW writer. My search continues ..... Anyone familiar with neoDVD +4 ? Says it will write to +RW but how about +R ? Is their multiple transitions ? if so are they any good ? I know, I know it's a matter of opinion but give it to me anyway.

Thanks, Jean

[mdm]

PictureShow will write to +R/RW, but I think you need the update patch which only works on the purchased version. I've used it to burn to +R with no problems.

[vitualis]

Ulead MovieFactory allows video and still photo integration.Nero is also simple(no transitions)but makes 704x480(NTSC)stills.

So nero took the original jpeg and convert it into a 0.338 megabit picture.
I will say it is respectable since 1.3meg digi-cam is 1280x1024 and 2 megcam is 1600 x 1280.

But Jpeg is also quality sensitive ( like CQ ), therefore if Nero pick a different compression ratio (5), then the picture reproduce on a prinetr or computer going to have distortion around the subject's face !

Time to do less guessing and more reading SingSing...

The high resolution stills on a VCD are NOT in JPEG. They are encoded as MPEG Still Images.

If you use a good quality VCD authoring program, the quality of the stills will be excellent (e.g., VCDEasy and Nero does a good job too).

704x480/576 is near the maximum resolution displayable on a TV (and realistically, is BEYOND most standard TVs). That is, when displayed on a TV, VCD high resolution still images are going to be as good as you are going to get in terms of image quality.

As MPEG Still Images on a VCD are essentially recognised by NO imaging program (and since they also don't have a pixel aspect ratio of 1:1), it is inappropriate for you to use them as a source for printing (not that you will really be able to do it anyway).

Since you can put additional files on a VCD filesystem, the best way is to include the source images on the VCD. This will take up some disc space but it allows you to backup your original images. If you want to print images, then use the source files.

Regards.

[Slide Woman]

It seems we may have to wait awhile longer to see what the next generation of programs bring us. Basially we want a CD &/or DVD program to write to +R & +RW, slide show program, no drag and drop, with professional (or close to it) multiple transitions. I've looked at everything all of you have posted to date and none have all I am looking for.

Thanks, Jean

[mdm]

You shouldn't have to wait very long for what you're looking for. The programs that offer the fancy transitions currenlty create VCD spec MPEGs, but should eventually be updated to create DVD spec MPEGs.

[louruns]

Perhaps Pinnacle Expression would work. I read a message in the Pinnacle DV8 newsgroup from someone who uses this for his slideshows onto SVCD. Fry's Electronics has it for $25 after rebate through the 30th. Unfortunately, there's no trial download available.

Louise

[MOVIEGEEK]

Pinnacle is an excellent program as long as you have a DV camera and
firewire port.

[G-man]

OK, I found something that may work for you, although it will take a little extra effort ......

Freeware called Slide Show Movie Maker
( download at http://www.joern-thiemann.de/tools/index.html )
will take puctures and convert them into a DVD (720x480) resolution AVI file with many selectable transitions. Has lots of features and options like text captions and background music.

Once you have the AVI file you can encode it into DVD MPEG2 format using something like TMPGEnc or DVD Movie Factory and burn it.

[tobee]

You can also try Photo2VCD Professional. It's very easy to burn a photo video CD with background music and transtion effects.

http://www.photo2vcd.com

[BIT122]

I HAVE USED ULEAD VIDEO STUDIO 5 AND ALSO VERSION 6 TO MAKE PHOTO VCD'S WITH MENU'S, TITLES, MUSIC AND TRANSITIONS WITHOUT ANY PROBLEMS,,,....WORKS GREAT. I ALSO TOOK ALL MY PHOTOS (LAST 30 + YEARS AND PUT THEM ON DVD AS A PHOTO SLIDE SHOW WITH MUSIC, TRANSITIONS AND THE WORKS. THEY ALSO LOOK GREAT WITH HIGH RESOLUTION. (4000 + PHOTOS SCANNED INTO COMPUTER.)