« Upcoming group show at Summer Studios in Lomita | Home | Art Show, in a Hospital? »
Slideshow Madness
By jorsillo | March 9, 2009
Orsillo Slideshow from joseph orsillo on Vimeo.
I am finally done with my slideshow submission for the annual Palm Springs Photo Festival. I just got in under the wire- deadline was March 9. Who new it was so easy, yet so incredibly frustrating to make a decent slideshow. I started out in iPhoto. It was easy enough. Import photos, add music and export to MOV (criteria for the contest). The downside was two fold. Adding the Ken Burns effect was a simple one button click, but it had no options. All of my images were getting chopped at the knees and neck, so I opted for the equally as simple fit to frame option with a nice cross fade between slides. What really killed this for me though was the resulting MOV file. The defaults were a measly 640×480 movie, and I could not for the life of me change it to anything else. It looked fine at one to one, but it fell apart when viewed full screen (plus I really did want to use some sort of Burns-ie animation).
Next obvious choices were the rest of the iLife suite. iMovie and iDVD both yielded results similar to iPhoto, but were much more difficult to use. Then I remembered the much heralded FotoMagico. This app was a dream to use. Easy drag and drop operation and music integration. But the clincher was total control of the slide animations. It is very easy and intuitive to designate start and end points for each image, including scaling. Finally, I had the show I had envisioned, but once again the export killed me. There are several export options in sort of a wizard configuration. Simply choose your output device, answer a couple of questions and go get a sandwich while the video renders. Fifteen minutes later I eagerly launch my newly exported MOV file. My self satisfaction quickly turned to horror when I saw the first slide. WTF! every image was washed and faded, and not in the good way. It was as if someone turned the gamma up to three or four (it just looked really shitty). A quick look at the FotoMagico preview, both full screen and in the window, looked just fine, but the Quicktime file was definitely screwie.
Literally a day and a half of trying different export options all resulted in the same shit file coming out of FotoMagico, but the worst part was that the freakin’ previews still looked as good as ever. If I could only get my final Quicktime movie to look as good as the freakin’ preview. THEN IT HIT ME. Grab a screen shot of the PREVIEW. Enter iShowU, a very slick screen cast app I acquired back when I thought I was gonna be the next Ben Wilmore. I made one tutorial and hadn’t thought of this app until today. After a little fiddling, I was able to set the FotoMagico preview window in line with the iShowU capture window, all while capturing system audio to get the soundtrack that was already synced. I initially captured the video with a little head and tail room, thinking I would trim the excess in iMovie. I obviously had my head up my ass because the resulting iMovie file looked just as washed as the resulting FotoMagico export, but the intermediate iShowU file was perfect! Seriously, WTF?
After a couple of tries I finally did a straight FotoMagico to iShowU catpure, no editing required, and right to the contest specks, the whole thing clocks in at 3:00 minutes exactly (give or take a second or two). Of course the resulting file was huge, nearly 500 megabytes, so I took it into my favorite app in the whole wide world, VisualHub (RIP), and knocked it down to a much more palatable 40 megs or so.
The sad reality is that despite all of this effort, there really is no chance I’ll get invited to the show. But at least all of you fine people can sit back and enjoy the fruits of my labor.
BTW- the sound track is Heard Them Stirring by Fleet Foxes. Awesome, awesome, awesome.
Topics: Uncategorized |
Comments
You must be logged in to post a comment.