Let's Put On a Show!

In another thread Asher said he’d like to see more from my recent Egypt trip – Asher is a brave man indeed. My photos from that trip are mostly travel snaps, but that’s what made me realize that I have not seen any threads on presentation or, IOW, what do we do with all these pictures? Back in the day I gave many 35mm slide shows, from click and talk to two-projectors with programmable dissolve and sound-track. So, as long as this is the Travel discussion group, my question is, do any of you do digital “slide shows” when you get home and if so, how?

1. Who is your audience? Do you have more than one type of audience (bird club, professional photographers, Aunt Martha, and so on)?
2. What composition and/or presentation software do you use?
3. Do you prefer live or canned narration (if any)?
4. How much time do you spend on the non-Photoshop part of the show, e.g. sound effects, music, story line?
5. How many photos (or how much elapsed time) can your audience stand before becoming comatose?
6. Most P&S cameras now take excellent NTSC video. Do you mix stills with video?
7. What hardware do you use? Computer? DVD? Projectors? Big screen TV? Aunt Martha’s Philco that she bought for the 1952 Democratic Convention broadcast? Do you carry your own hardware or rely on the audience to supply all or part of the setup? Do you have a minimum quality/resolution requirement?
8. Either as the presenter or the audience, what do you think are the essentials of a successful show?

I ask all these question on Asher’s behalf, because we live in the same part of town and there is a real chance he would be invited to dinner at the price of seeing my Egypt pictures. Let’s all pitch in and make this as enjoyable for him as we can.

That's exciting and generous of you, Chuck I am looking forward to this show.

I do have a projector. I wish I had a handy carrying case for my Eizo 21" monitor!

Asher

To not answer any of your questions, I have been fond of the slideshows that pan and zoom to music. I have been trying to find an efficient way to do this in a skilled fashion. The best idea I've had so far is to write a script for Vegas ( Sony's video NLE ).

Alas, I haven't gotten to it yet...

I travel too...

I am a frequent traveler too and what I usually do is put a select few images up on the web on my www.pbase.com gallery - no music.

If they are truly snaps then I have even put them on Ofoto in the past to let my travel companions buy what they want with no fuss from me. I am going to change that because in my effort to put them up costs me time to do that, so I am making a website with direct printing from the labs. Sometimes, I have been in groups as big as 80 people - not all friends - and I want some compensation for the efforts.

Some images, I consider art and I don't put those up since I don't want them copied. My intention is to build up enough to gallery them and show them and sell them.

Ed - I have Vegas too and have used the pan and scan to animate maps in a video. I don't know if the motion one would want would be the same for every picture, and a script would repeat the motion exactly. I don't see a way out of doing it picture by picture, but once you get into the swing of it the work goes pretty quickly. Matching it up with sound is more work.

BTW, one of the goodies with Vegas is that we can create Hi-Def videos, and all stills, even from cheap P&S cameras, have resolution way beyond even HD so you can pan any image in HD. However, showing a HD video presents hardware problems - one of the reasons I raised this topic.

Interesting, this is one of the more important things on my wishlist in deed. I want to create slideshows with my own music. Ideally as downloadable PDF files, but I have no idea yet whether I could incorporate music into PDF's.

I plan to have a website where visitors can download such slideshows instead of catalogs.

Personally, I am going to put a lot of effort into the music aspect as well, I think I would like to have long versions and short versions, whereby short means around 3-5 minutes, and long up to 20 minutes.

To make the transition of the slides as interesting as possible would be also important to me. How many different transition templates does vegas have?

I was also thinking of gettiung a P&S with good video clip quality, because I thought it could be interesting to make an introduction overview of the area where I shot the pictures.

Georg this idea of music with images is important to consider. After all, the setting of the picture, the matting, the frame and the room are important to how the photograph is perceived.

A title, the name of the Photographer, what pictures are nearby, the text on the page can shift perception. In the same way, music can direct interpretations by the mood, imagery it, itself, evokes.

Asher

George, I have Vegas 5.0 which is not the most current version, and it has 25 major transition categories, and in each of the 25 there are variations. Should be more than enough. BTW, in Vegas, as in Photoshop and most programs, there is a 'lite' version you might check out before spending the big bucks. Even doing videos I don't use a tenth of what Vegas can do.

Here's a quick link to an add-on tool for vegas that has a "photomontage" tool...

http://videoediting.digitalmedianet.com/articles/viewarticle.jsp?id=34866

Edward Bussa said:

To not answer any of your questions, I have been fond of the slideshows that pan and zoom to music. I have been trying to find an efficient way to do this in a skilled fashion. The best idea I've had so far is to write a script for Vegas ( Sony's video NLE ).

Alas, I haven't gotten to it yet...

Click to expand...

I also prefer panning and zooming, it makes the pictures look alive. I use a media center PC (a silent pc running under the MS Media Center XP 2005 OS). This PC is coupled to my recently acquired 52" full-HD TV via a DVI-HDMI cable, running at a resolution of 1920x1080. The picture quality I'm getting is absolutely stunning.

There is a slide show option in the Media Center that pans and zooms pictures randomly. This is not in synch with the beat of the music (which I run in the background) but yet, it produces very pleasing results.

Since I also happen to be a video hobbyist, I know all about the importance of editing footage linked to the music track that underlies it. I personally use Avid and Premiere but Vegas is also a very nice piece of software.

Cheers,

Cem - that's very interesting. May I ask what brand of PC you have? Some time ago I asked Hewlett-Packard if they had *any* model that would play back a HD video from the hard drive through its HDMI port and they said No(!). Since a salesman never misses a sales opportunity, I was amazed. Another question - what software are you using for displaying at this quality level? Is it built in to the Media Center XP system? Is it showing individual slides as would Powerpoint, or does it compile them into a video, as would Premiere or Avid?

Cem and Chuck,

This is routine and so easy in iPhoto, a free part of any Mac computer for years!

Asher

Chuck Bragg said:

Cem - that's very interesting. May I ask what brand of PC you have? Some time ago I asked Hewlett-Packard if they had *any* model that would play back a HD video from the hard drive through its HDMI port and they said No(!). Since a salesman never misses a sales opportunity, I was amazed. Another question - what software are you using for displaying at this quality level? Is it built in to the Media Center XP system? Is it showing individual slides as would Powerpoint, or does it compile them into a video, as would Premiere or Avid?

Click to expand...

Hi Chuck,

The MCE XP PC is a self built one. But as far as the configuration is concerned, it is nothing special (2 yrs old now). It does not have a HDMI port, only a DVI-D one which can be converted to HDMI by means of a DVI-D <-> HDMI cable or adapter. You need a HD-TV which can show 1:1 pixel mapping at a resolution of 1920x1080 (progressive, i.e. 1080p). 1:1 makes the TV virtually the equivalent of a LCD Monitor for your PC. Actually, the PC recognizes the TV automatically as a monitor including the brand name and type when I plug it in.

The MCE XP runs very smoothly and I can also run full HD films from my harddisk. However, the processor becomes fully loaded if I do that. It is after all a measly Athlon 64 running at 3000 MHz. If I'd build this PC again, I'd only consider using a Intel Core 2 Duo E6420 instead. It runs much faster and cooler. The video card is an nVidia 7600 GT with silent cooling. The SD-TV footage, recorded or displayed live using the twin TV tuners is automatically upscaled to the 1080p resolution, but you see every imperfection very well since all the faults and artifacts are also blown up in size.

The software for displaying the photo slideshow is part of the MCE XP. Since MCE XP runs at a resolution of 1920x1080 @ 32-bits, the photos are also sized on-the-fly to match this resolution. The slideshow is a bit like Powerpoint, built on the run and not compiled in advance. You point it to a directory containing pictures and off it goes.

HTH. If not, please do not hesitate to ask for more info.

Cheers,

Asher Kelman said:

Cem and Chuck,

This is routine and so easy in iPhoto, a free part of any Mac computer for years!

Asher

Click to expand...

Hi Asher,

It is equally easy under the MCE XP. The reason I've mentioned Avid or Premiere is due to the fact that I sometimes create DVD slideshows to hand over to family or friends.

Cheers,

Asher, by "this is routine" I assume you mean showing still pictures at high resolutions - a traditional style slide show. However, if you want to lay down specific pans and zooms (not random ones) then you must create a *video* to play them back. If this video is HD, then the system load is very high, as Cem said. I don't think many computers more than a couple of years old could handle the load.

One other way to go is the 'multimedia player'. A TVix box that plays back all formats all the way to HD sells for $250 plus the hard drive you install. If it really works, it's a lot cheaper than building a new computer, or adding a Blue Ray writer and playback setup.

Chuck Bragg said:

...One other way to go is the 'multimedia player'. A TVix box that plays back all formats all the way to HD sells for $250 plus the hard drive you install. If it really works, it's a lot cheaper than building a new computer, or adding a Blue Ray writer and playback setup.

Click to expand...

Either that, or you can do what I did: buy a Sony PS3!. It has a Blue-ray player and displays photos in a very nice slideshow at HD resolution from a CF/SD/etc card or from the internal disk or CD-ROM/DVD, etc; see also:
http://www.us.playstation.com/PS3/Using/LookAtPictures

The only downside? The price is a tad more than $250 (twice actually). But you get the cheapest Blue-ray drive available thrown into the deal plus a wide gamut HDMI connection at 1080p ;-).


Cheers,

I assume you can not write Blue Ray on the PS3, would that be right?

Georg Baumann said:

I assume you can not write Blue Ray on the PS3, would that be right?

Click to expand...

Correct. But I am not after a BR or HD writer ATM. They are still very expensive. The writer costs about 700-800 Euro. The BR disks are about 20 Euro per piece! The capacity of a single sided BR is equal to 6 DVDs, if you'd burn DVDs instead it'd cost you 3 Euro at the most. Also, there are yet uncertain issues such as the longevity of the media. I'll wait for a year or so before I make the move.

Cheers,

Yup, remains to be seen what standard will come out of that battle.

Georg Baumann said:

Yup, remains to be seen what standard will come out of that battle.

Click to expand...

Indeed. I'm hoping that multi standard writers (Blue-ray and HD in one drive) will become mainstream later this year. Afterwards, waiting for the standards to settle won't be necessary.

Cheers,