Chris Kenward said to Bob Gearhart at 01-29-03  23:49
 Subject: Re: New Photos up!

 CK> Naturally! :) Thanks for the advice. Will play with 'em and see what
 CK> happens.

 CK> While I have your attention, do you have any preferences with regard
 CK> to slideshow creators? I have a copy of both ULEAD Picture Show and
 CK> Roxio WinOnCD. Have you used either? I want to be able to create
 CK> slideshows of my photos to send to family etc., complete in some cases
 CK> with appropriate music etc.

 Sorry but I'm not familiar with those programs.  For a pure slide
 show I would probably use Irfanview, my favorite viewer for almost
 everything,  A freeby; http://www.irfanview.com/ Just burn your
 pictures to the CD, then add the Irfanview program and put an
 autostart file on the CD that runs it as the viewer. No sound I
 think.

 I use a program called Premier which comes with a lot of plugins and
 tremendous capabilities similar to Photoshop to produce videos.
 Problem is, it is also in the same 600 buck price range. I also use
 a couple products from The Sonic Foundry, Acid Music and Sound Forge,
 to create and edit background music. Because I'm in their list of
 registered users, I receive new sounds promos and such mailings
 regularly. I recently got a CD filled with demo programs for their
 latest versions and included was a movie making program called Video
 Factory.

 I didn't need the movie program but ordered the upgrades to the other
 stuff and it came along with the new registration number used to open
 the entire CD.  The whole shebang is only $149.95, and cost me $99 as
 an upgrade.  The ACID Music once was a 300 buck program so it's quite
 a nice drop in price.  I believe the Video Factory alone is someplace
 in the 60-70 buck range but I would recommend getting the entire
 package.

 With it, you can create your music, edit other folks music taking
 sections or pieces out adding them to your creations, limited only by
 your own imagination. I should add "and copyright restrictions
 depending on your intended audiance."   Build your slide show by
 dropping your pictures on the movie time line. This gives you complete
 control, allowing the blending of  pictures together with any video
 you may have taken, selecting transitions from a long list of really
 cool built in stuff. Once you drop a still picture on the time line
 you can tell the program to display that picture for x amount of
 seconds, minutes whatever.  The back ground can be made music and
 even a voice over where you might feel it is appropriate.

 There is one big problem to this arrangement and it doesn't bother
 me, but might make it less suitable for you.  I'm thinking a 25 cent
 CD you can play on a DVD player.  You can use Video Factory to create
 the file and Nero Burning ROM, or I understand the latest ROXIO too,
 to burn an SVCD. Thats a Super Video CD, (720x480 here in NTSC.) I
 forget what the PAL standard is over there but they will do it too.
 Nero puts the proper header info on the CD that will play from anyone's
 DVD player on their television set. The problem that arises is, unless
 you are burning true DVD's at a cost of about 5 bucks each, you can
 only get about 15 minutes of video on a regular two bit CD using mpeg
 compression at decent resolution.  If you have a longer show in mind,
 then you could introduce intermissions to get another beer or some
 popcorn every 15 minutes.

 The mpeg file created for the movie can of course be run on someone's
 computer as a stand alone using any of the common viewers, like the
 Windows Media Viewer.

 Thats my 2 pence worth, I hope others will voice theirs.


 Bob fer


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