need a technique

There are two kinds of DVD slide shows. One is a movie made from slides. It allows transitions, pans & zooms, soundtracks and anything else you want to do with a movie. However, the image quality is not great.


The other is called a DVD slide show. Each picture is displayed in full frame and they can be set to automatically advance in a pre-set number of seconds. Or they can be advanced or replayed by using the chapter skip buttons on the remote control. You can pause one of these slides on screen practically forever. The picture quality is better, but remember that you're still dealing with 480i interlaced images.


Toast 6 and 7 create these slide shows by dragging the photos to the Toast Video window. Each Title can hold up to 99 slides and you can have up to 99 Titles. Toast does not allow a soundtrack.


iDVD does these slide shows as well and allows a sound track. So does CaptyDVD 2.


It's a good idea to use your photo editing sofware to resample the pictures to 720x480 because that software may do a better job of resampling than will Toast, iDVD or CaptyDVD.

I'm a photographer, and I make custom slide shows using Boinx's FotoMagico. I make the title slides in Photoshop. FotoMagico does captions (which are OK) and I think a recent version does title slides. However, most presentation programs that do titles don't have the leading and kerning controls to render professional-quality type, and FotoMagico is no different in this one area.


It has a brilliant interface that is easy to learn. The pan-and-zoom controls (Ken Burns effect) are particularly well done and unlike Apple iPhoto, are fully customizable for each onscreen image. You can control the length of time each image appears on screen, AND the length of time it takes to make each transition. It has the best interface for doing this I have ever seen.


You can add soundtracks for music or narration and burn a DVD of a FotoMagico slide show, but I have never actually burned a DVD myself. FotoMagico saves shows in the QuickTime movie format...


The product has a silly name (the developers are in Germany), but it is reliable, nicely donw, and you really can produce professional quality work using it. FotoMagico is relatively inexpensive ($79), and you can download a fully functional trial version from the company's Web site:

http://www.boinx.com

Quote:
If you want to pan and scan (called the Ken Burns effect even though he did not in fact invent the technique) and create a "DVD" you are in fact seeking to make a video. The best that video can do is about 72 x 72 pixels since the frame rate is moving about 29.97 frames per sec.


The only way out for you without spending money and time ( applications such as Photoshop take time to learn how to use) is to use the regular slide show process in either Powerpoint or Apple's product. You will give up on pan and scan unless you want to insert short QT videos but you can give the feeling of the slide show by changing the time between slides. I recall doing this once a long time ago and I do remember stumbling early on the fact that if you put the output onto a CD, the CD ( or DVD) will not spin fast enough for the video component (it is uncompressed). So the presentation was done from a hard drive. That was one reason I went on to FCP and other stuff. I have not worked with Powerpoint or Apple's application since but they must have improved.

Have you looked at Keynote 2?


It can save all the images as a Quicktime movie, Flash, PDF or as a folder of images. I like its rendering of Text, much better than Powerpoint.


I recently had a PC-based client give me a Powerpoint document, which I then opened in Keynote 2 and exported to PDF. I then took the slides into iMove and intercut them with a video that had been shot before using iDVD to make the final DVD. It looked way superior to their feeble attempts to try and do the same thing using PC tools.


If you want to pan and zoom across images, I recommend Photo to Movie , which I find is way superior to iMovie's Ken Burns effect. There's something similar to this that comes with Toast called Moving Pictures.


Lastly, I would suggest editing the resulting video in iMovie HD, preferably using 1080i or 720p HDV, and then going to iDVD. You'll get excellent quality using that combo. I also have DVD Studio Pro and Final Cut Pro, but find that for 95 percent of my projects it's easier to use iMovie and iDVD.


Dennis