Photo slide show production

[Stagecoach]

I need to produce a slide show for media sharing and viewing that I will likely put on You Tube. The project is to present my best/favorite images of a full marathon up in the highlands I covered last week with backing music.

Yesterday I downloaded 'Win Movie Maker' which appeared to be an excellent choice, quick to learn and easy to use and undertook some trials. I found that whatever I produced using around 8 trial images only, once exported and saved when played on my 4k monitor was poor quality and severely pixelated 'during' the picture transitions. I'm not sure where I'm going wrong.

I was using test images 1920px wide (3:2 ratio) around 400/500kb. My computer and graphics card should be able to handle this.

Has anyone any clues or tips please? It is likely what I produce will primarily be viewed on phones, I pads and laptops but I must have good quality.

Grahame

[Rita]

Hi Graham, I don't know anything about the program you mention but I have been looking into some slide show programs and one that seems to be interesting (at least to me) is Av Studio Pro. You can see it at WnSoft.com It does have the ability to save and view from a number of different formats.

[Manfred M]

Grahame - check your output settings. There has to be a place where you can set the output side, frame rate and codec. Your 1920 x 1080 is an HD configuration so you need to output to that size. I suggest that you also ensure that your output is progressive (not interleaved) and at least 24 frames per second (which is a feature film standard). I tend to use a 30 fps for online videos. I have found that the H.264 codec gives me decent HD results.

I do my work in Adobe Premiere Pro and these settings are made on the media rendering side, not the input side.

[Stagecoach]

Hi Graham, I don't know anything about the program you mention but I have been looking into some slide show programs and one that seems to be interesting (at least to me) is Av Studio Pro. You can see it at WnSoft.com It does have the ability to save and view from a number of different formats.

Hi Rita, I have had a look at Av Studio Pro and it would certainly do what I want but appears a bit over the top at this stage.

[Stagecoach]

Grahame - check your output settings. There has to be a place where you can set the output side, frame rate and codec. Your 1920 x 1080 is an HD configuration so you need to output to that size. I suggest that you also ensure that your output is progressive (not interleaved) and at least 24 frames per second (which is a feature film standard). I tend to use a 30 fps for online videos. I have found that the H.264 codec gives me decent HD results.

I do my work in Adobe Premiere Pro and these settings are made on the media rendering side, not the input side.

Thanks Manfred.

I have now spent some time checking the output settings and corrected mine to 1920 x 1080. Having run a number of tests using short 10 image slide shows I'm now getting good quality on many transitions other than on a few certain types. Fortunately there's enough choice of ones that work well to suit my needs.

Now the work starts on preparing enough images to cover a 3 minute music track.

[Manfred M]

Thanks Manfred.

I have now spent some time checking the output settings and corrected mine to 1920 x 1080. Having run a number of tests using short 10 image slide shows I'm now getting good quality on many transitions other than on a few certain types. Fortunately there's enough choice of ones that work well to suit my needs.

Now the work starts on preparing enough images to cover a 3 minute music track.

I find that transitions are the one thing that tend to be highly dependent on the recipient's bandwidth. When making a slideshow for use in a low bandwidth environment, I just stick with hard cuts (most of the television and feature film industry use these most of the time).

Usually the only transitions that are used are cross-fade, fade to black and fade to white. Fades are used to suggest passage of time, whereas cuts are used elsewhere. I tend to stick with fade to black with titles or pre-roll or post-roll. If I use transitions, I will cross fade. I think I have only used fade to white a few times. All of the other transitions, I avoid. My video editing instructor suggested they were "tacky" and not used in professional quality work. There is some truth in what she said.