# A VERY Nice Slide Show Program...



## Richard King (Mar 25, 2002)

I produce a slide show for a local charity event each year. Well, the time has come for this year's show. The show consists of pictures taken at the event over the last 30 years. I started producing the show about 4 or 5 years ago and each year add the previous year's pix to the show. It is now up to 880 pictures and almost fills an entire CD-R. I produce the show using the program available here: http://www.wnsoft.com/apr/index.html
The program is available for $24 for a personal use registration and does everything that I need for my once a year show. Overall I am quite impressed. I just downloaded the newest version (free update) and found that they have added many new transition effects. If you have the need for such a program take a look.


----------



## DonLandis (Dec 17, 2003)

Today my Daughter gets married- The event kept growing and growing these past 6 months. As the father of the bride and one who "works in the business" I was tasked with doing all the video and photographic tasks for the big event eventhough I do TV production and not still photography or video weddings. Never the less, I know when to hire experts so I subbed out the photography job and decided to tackle the video work myself, and planned to KISS the project. About 4 weeks ago the inlaws to be suggested I do a video of the kids for the Reception. I got the MOB and MOG to collect all the photos from Baby on up and I did some of my own photography for their event last summer. But how to assemble all this??? I went online a few weeks ago and discovered a fantastic program that made the whole process easy. In one hour I had downloaded the program package and installed it. I decided to just buy the proferssional package as it had all the whistles and bells that would make my job easy. All the photo retouch and resizing features were built in with the pro package. 

The package is 3D album and has 3rd party plugin support as well. 3d party support is a great way to tell if a product is well seasoned in the business. 3D album has many, many formats that are not just "family album" but also everything from special event to corporate presentation styles. I felt this would be a fantastic tool for my edit suite. But the best is how it works-

As you can imagine, collecting all sorts of photos and digital images, I got everything from 16x20 to 1x2 school photos, B&W, magenta color faded, and perfect color 8x10, slides, video clips and memoriabilia to use. I got the Mothers to do the scans and file name them by age and then all I had to do was put the scans in a windows folder, select the presentation I theme I wanted and then configure it's custom details. Although the docs are also downloaded in pdf, I really didn't need to read any of the instructions as the whole process was so intuitive. Once all the photos were in a folder, I simply arranged them in order within the software listing, using click and drag, then play it and it ran real time to preview the project. I was able to select the timing in a timeline to have the pictures change by the beat of the music I inserted in the audio part of the program and once done, rendered the whole thing to a DVD burn file set. 
I purchased the entire package and then one additional plugin theme that was from a 3rd party and it installed and integrated flawlessly. The additional theme was $14 I recall. The starting point on the base program was somewhere around $40 but I bought the Pro version which has all the bells and whistles. Having all those features built in the complete package just made my project time much shorter as it had global adjustments that I applied to groups of pictures and that was much faster than dealing with hundreds of images in photoshop. Anyway, by 5 PM, just 5 hours later I had my wife review my work, playing it from the DVD master I just burned and she said it was perfect! I love when that happens but the fact is the tool is so good, if she didn't like the theme I selected, I could easily switch it to another of the hundreds to choose from in a minute and the entire look of the presentation would be new, no redo of the photos. If I needed to apply a new special formating to the photos, that selection could be globally changed as well. e.g. I added a subtle brush glaze finish to all the photos since some were glossy, some matte and then with B&W, adjusted them to sepia tone etc. Like I said this package is the right tool to really do a great job easily. 
The nice part is the package is modular and you can enter it at different price points and upgrade as you need. IT doesn't seem to be a dead end package and I really think this will help in assembling portions of the final wedding video as well as stuff I do to insert in my TV shows. I have't looked into how it works with HDTV video yet but I imagine that may get a bit tricky. I have hired two associate videographers to video the wedding and reception this afternoon and one of them will be shooting with my high def camera so I'll be checking that feature out later.

Check it out at-
3D-album.com


----------



## Nick (Apr 23, 2002)

Thanks for the posts, guys -- both of these apps are of interest to me, but I have a more basic question...

For years, I have had an assortment of old family photos, mostly in the form of physical snapshots' which I inherited from my mother when she died. Some of these date back to my childhood and a few are from before I was born.

Since mother's passing in 1983, I have long wanted to do something with this _ad hoc_ family record, but in back the '80s, the thought of organizing, reprinting or even Xerox-copying all those photographs was daunting to say the least. Even now, the work involved in scanning all these individual photos into digital files doesn't appeal to me.

A while back I heard somewhere of a scanner or utility that would allow the user to scan multiple photos at one pass and would automatically separate them into individual digital files for organizing into albums, presentation, etc. Do either of you know if of the above apps provide for scanning/separation of multiple photos, and if not, do you know of a scanner/utility that will do this?

tia


----------



## Richard King (Mar 25, 2002)

I don't know of that utility, but certainly could have used it when I did my first slide show for this group. I think I scanned a minimum of 500 slides to get that first slide show assembled. Now it's easy because I simply add the digital px each year (and I take the pix).


----------



## Richard King (Mar 25, 2002)

Don, 
I'll check out the program in the next few days. I liked the one that I used because I could drop all 880+ slides into it with one click and set it for random transitions. Once all the slides were scanned or uploaded to the computer producing the slide show was about a 10 minute project. They have a beta version (version 5.0) that looks very interesting. It will do anything that the old multi slide projector shows could do (back in the old days  ) There are some great sample programs in the forums on the site. http://www.picturestoexe.com/forums/index.php Just what you guys need, another forum to get addicted to. :lol:


----------



## DonLandis (Dec 17, 2003)

Yes, Richard, I saw that but it was too much like a powerpoint presentation so it wasn't to my liking. It is slick to get the presentation done, however it doesn't have all the bells and whistles plus the 3D animations I was really looking for.

Remember, this whole project from searching the internet for the application to the finished DVD was all done in 5 hours.

Nick- I know whart you are looking for but most of those aren't cheap, unless you were referring to a flat bed scanner where you put several pics on the flatbed and then do one scan where the software then builds an auto selection process to the outline of each photo. Then when you say OK, it saves each to a sequential file name. That I can do with my HP scanner it the included software but trust me, it really is no time saver. Here is what I did for my wife. I recently acquired an Epson flatbed scanner with inkjet printer, photocopier package, The unit was around a hundred bucks but ink is expensive, anyway I gave this to my daughter and it went out under warranty. Epson sent her a new one and she left the old one here so I played with it and got the scanner working. It is 8.5 x 11 scanner. I downloaded the scanner software from Epson website and got it to work for an auto configure. Now my wife drops the picture in clicks on the button to scan and it saves the file one per scan / picture in about a minute. It was faster than my HP. Plus it saved all photos to 1024 x 768 files as I set the defaults to for auto. Made life easier and the crop points were all automatic. I was really impressed with its efficiency for all those photos we scanned. My wife did about 200 in a couple of hours. But she had all of them organized and selected from the thousands we had. Her only complaint was that it was just long enough to occupy here and she couldn't do anything else but too long to keep here busy. Oh well, you know women how impatient they can get with technology! Anyway, what we set up for here to scan was about as fast a process as I have ever done.

here's the link to the family 3D album video I did with the package.
windows media 9 file
http://www.tv-shopper.com/receptionvideo/


----------



## Nick (Apr 23, 2002)

That's a great presentation, Don. The resolution on my 1024x768 laptop screen was a little fuzzy -- was that an effect to mask defects in the pics, and does it look any sharper when viewed directly off the DVD?

PS A good song for the wedding pics is "Wind Beneath My Wings". Bette Midler made it a hit, but my all time favorite rendition is an earlier arrangement sung by Lou Rawls. A personal note -- my federal son and his bride had it performed live as a prelude to their wedding ceremony - my (then) my wife leaned over and whispered it was in my honor. That really broke me up. :icon_cry:


----------



## Bogy (Mar 23, 2002)

Like Nick, I have a big box of pictures I want to scan. I also have several albums of slides. Back when our first daughter was born, 26 years ago, I mostly shot color slides or b/w. The slides I really liked were made into prints. Most of those slides have not seen the light of day for 25 years. I hope to get some of it done while I'm on vacation in July. One of the very first days of vacation I need to get the steel plate out of my leg. This will be nothing like what I have had previously, just slicing my leg open, backing out 4 screws, removing the plate and stitching/stapling my leg together again. But I will take it easy for a few days. Sitting somewhere scanning pictures doesn't sound too strenuous. 

Don, great looking presentation. (Great looking daughter as well.) Many couples have a presentation of some kind at the reception, but we also have couples who provide pictures and we do a presentation on our screen prior to the ceremony. Even more frequently we are doing this for funerals. Right now we have been using PowerPoint, but there are some other programs designed specifically for use in churches. I just have not had time to do anything about it yet.


----------



## DonLandis (Dec 17, 2003)

Thanks guys for the compliments. She was radient yesterday and I couldn't have asked for a better day. There were a few hiccups in the program getting started, mostly with me not knowing what was happening next, but the best part was the predicted thunderstorms never happened. Plus, my first experience with a full Catholic Mass service, long, but very beautiful. The Groom's parents were mostly in charge of that part and we did the Reception planning. I must say it was the biggest event and planning effort of my life. I had two HDTV cameras covering the event who shot over 5 hours of tape. I have a huge job editing that now as HDTV editing is slower.

Nick- The fuzziness of the video is due to the high compression rate of the video. plus I reduced it's output pixel count to 320x240 for the webcast. The DVD is rendered at full 720x480 and at 8 mbs. The webcast is at 320x240 and at 356 kbs. That would account for the big difference. My animation package could have output the render to full HDTV 1080i x 1280 since that was where I set the original scans for all the pictures at. Make sense? But I only did the render to 720x480 because DVD was my top distribution media. The effects I added globally to the old photos in the first part were brush like transparency arround the edges of each photo. After seeing it now for a bunch of times, I probably should have selected something different, but I had to finish the project so tweaking art forever and ever is somthing I've learned not to do but call it finished when it looks good overall. Nick- regarding music- I suppose I could use RIAA or BMI stuff but being in the business and once having a personal bout in a lawsuit I just don't use music that I don't have contract rights to use.

Bogy- If you do these for your members, you should check out the themes available in 3D Album. You may find as I did that Power point will never be used again.  Also, years ago I had a slide scanner. Back then it wasn't cheap but I had a business with it so it paid for itself. If you have a bunch to do you might consider buying one, say off e-bay and then reselling it when you are done. These scanners designed for slides produce very high quality and are easy to automate the scanning process. 

PS- good luck with your operation. Hope you don't have too much pain because you get more cranky than Nick when you do. At least that happened the last time.


----------



## Richard King (Mar 25, 2002)

Very nicely done Don. I am sure your daughter will appreciate the effort that went into the production. My slideshow is MUCH more basic than that, but serves the purpose. I project the show on a wall (about 10' diagonal) each year at the funraising party. The first picture is from 1979 and there are many people who have come to the event each year since. It's interesting seeing the pix of people through the years and the show gets much attention each time it runs. With 800+ slides (655Mb so far) it runs for quite some time then repeats throughout the night. I don't have any background or 3D effects, so the slides take the whole screen. I will have to play with the beta version one of these days (when time permits) to see if I can do some of the things that you have done. I know it will do pans, but don't know about the 3D effects.


----------



## BigApe (May 12, 2006)

Richard,

Thanks for the link in your original post. Looks like a simple yet effective tool.

Joe


----------

