Anyone making slideshows?

Clovishound

Clovishound

Senior Member
I got the idea to try my hand at a slideshow today. Doesn't look like the web based LR will do it. I looked up a video to show how to do it in PS. Not terribly intuitive, but once you know the secret handshake, the basics aren't difficult.

Having said that, it should not be a surprise, but there is a lot more to it than just throwing a handful of photos together and slapping a music track on it. Choice of music, transitions, length of display of an individual photo, pan/zoom/rotate, matching the different parts of the song to the right photo. The list goes on. There is also the issue of where and how to share them, copyright issues with the music. I choose a handful of my macro and flower pictures and grabbed what seemed a fitting song I had handy and tried one out.

I'll inflict it on the Pup and see what she has to say. I realize that I've got a long way to go to produce something I can be proud of, but nothing worthwhile is easy. Also, this may be one of those things I get excited about, and once I've made a reasonable amount of progress, lose interest. Every now and then I latch on to something that really clicks for me. (photography pun intended)

Any advice?
 
BF Hammer

BF Hammer

Senior Member
Windows Live Movie Maker was one of the easiest ways to do this back in Windows 7 days. I have not really tried for a few years now. I try to use Blender now but don't really understand it that well. Video is a weakness for me.

For Youtube, never use commercial music. They will remove the soundtrack after posting. Go to Creative Commons and download some free public domain music. Yeah, it's not very good music for the most part, but it won't cause trouble either.

My poor photography during the 2017 eclipse with special appearance by myself:

A weekend trip for waterfalls in northern Wisconsin:
I was falling sick with flu while at Superior Falls and immediately drove home (1 day early) after hiking out.

ps: I once had a slideshow video of an airshow that Youtube has since taken down. I used the Snoopy and the Red Baron song from the '60s and apparently somebody still has publishing rights on it somewhere. I thought it might be public domain now. Shame because I had the lyrics lining up with certain photos perfectly. I also had another airshow video removed because the Blue Angels where performing with Van Halen's "Dreams" playing on the public address. My video captured the sound, I did not add any other soundtrack. The MTV video for "Dreams" way back when was just showing the Blue Angels performing with A-4's.
 
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Fred Kingston

Fred Kingston

Senior Member
I use Imovie on my Mac... We have an option as a final project for these courses at the college to either print the class projects or do a slide show... Printing gets both expensive and timely within the timeline of the course, so I usually do the slide show... This was done simply in about an hour... Music is readily available for free on the internet without copyright restraints...

 
Clovishound

Clovishound

Senior Member
So, is there a good place to post a slideshow, besides Youtube, for inclusion here? I'd rather not use YT, if I can avoid it. I do, unfortunately, have an instagram account.

Also, what resolution do you normally render them for posting?
 
Clovishound

Clovishound

Senior Member
File size. Not sure if there are file size limits for most of the hosting services. Not sure what it would equate to, but I first rendered mine from 1500 x 1000 images and used the "high quality" setting which ended up with a 300 MB file. That may not be an issue, but I've never messed with video uploads before.
 
Fred Kingston

Fred Kingston

Senior Member
Only limits would be your upload speeds. I’ve uploaded several gig videos to YT. It takes longer for YT to process them that does for me to upload them.
 
BF Hammer

BF Hammer

Senior Member
Clovishound said:
So, is there a good place to post a slideshow, besides Youtube, for inclusion here? I'd rather not use YT, if I can avoid it. I do, unfortunately, have an instagram account.

Also, what resolution do you normally render them for posting?
Click to expand...
From the help topic here about linking to media:
Embeds media from approved sites into your message. It is recommended that you use the media button in the editor tool bar.
Approved sites: Apple Music, Dailymotion, Facebook, Flickr, Giphy, Imgur, Liveleak, Metacafe, Pinterest, Reddit, SoundCloud, Spotify, TikTok, Tumblr, Twitch, Twitter, Vimeo, YouTube
Click to expand...
Looks like Instagram is not an option. Odd that TikTok is an option. I think you are limited to vertical format video there.

I have looked and you can upload and share video to Nikon Image Space. But linking is not as easy there. Anybody who has registered their Nikon camera online is eligible for a free account.
 
W

WaltE

New member
I use Davinci Resolve. You can download the free version and get most of the features that the paid version provides. In Davinci Resolve there is a raw section on the color tab that will give you world class color grading (developing) capabilities which are actually better than Photoshop. There is a learning curve but I think the effort is worth it if you ever want to get into video work. Very capable platform with no limits. No worries per resolution, just set the timeline to the resolution you want and DR does the rest. Limit your bitrate to 60000kps and viola! Social media ready.
 
Clovishound

Clovishound

Senior Member
Well, I downloaded some royalty free music from You Tube, just to be sure there are no copyright issues, and reworked the slideshow. I uploaded it just now. Apparently, I have to wait until midnight before it will magically appear. I'll post a link when it becomes available. The worst thing was choosing a title.
 
Fred Kingston

Fred Kingston

Senior Member
That's pretty good... but YT has the capability to play 4K... I think you're limiting yourself by maxing at 720p... Afterall, your macro shots are all about the sharpness and the fine details...
 
Clovishound

Clovishound

Senior Member
Well, first try. I worked from the jpeg images I save for posting. I was afraid to use the full sized TIF files thinking it make working with, and rendering too slow and an unwieldy mp4 file. I rendered it at the highest quality available in PS, but I suppose the 1500x1000 original images throttled the final resolution. I will try something using the full sized and see how it turns out. In my defense, I watched the video from the rendered file on my external monitor hooked to my computer, and it looked very good resolution wise. Not sure what compression/resolution throttling is done when YT handles the video, if any.

The other bad news being that these are pretty much the cream of the crop for the last 6 months of shooting. So, I am unlikely to crank out another dozen of these in the next month or two. Still, it's a nice way to show off, I mean share my photos with family and friends.

I also think I could dispense with the watermark in slideshows.
 
Clovishound

Clovishound

Senior Member
Well, I tried using the full sized TIF files. My computer wasn't happy with it. I also discovered that there were higher resolution outputs than "high quality". I tried a new SS using my 1500x1000 jpegs and then used 1080i 29.97 for the quality. It rendered a much larger file, and probably took a little longer to render, but didn't have any of the slowing down issues I had using the TIF files. I may have to try saving a set of photos at a higher quality than 1500x1000 then see what issues I may have and what options there are for output.

Anyway, here's the link, if anyone is interested.

 
Clovishound

Clovishound

Senior Member
That one I just used the 1500x1000 jpgs I already had and then rendered them at 1080i 29.97. I really didn't feel like going to the trouble of resizing that many photos and then ending up with a really big rendered file. The resolution is fine for someone looking at a laptop screen or smaller. I'm not doing this to be the next Youtube star. At some point I will try a higher rez rendering.

I probably should have waited to post that last SS. I just now figured out how to add vertical images to a bunch of horizontal images without screwing everything up. Oh well, maybe I'll comb through and find enough good stuff to fill out a mix of them and the verticals I've wanted to use and couldn't.
 
Clovishound

Clovishound

Senior Member
OK, I tried making a higher resolution SS. I thought I might try the full sized TIFs again, but had two problems. One PS was running in syrup, again. Two, all the images were different sizes. I'm sure this is due to differences in cropping of the RAW file during processing. I ended up making a subfolder and dumping all the TIFs in it. I then imported them all into LR and one by one exported them as 3000x2020 jpeg files. It didn't take that long and solved both issues. I then worked up the SS and rendered it at high quality. BIG file, took a while to render. 1.22 gigs. Great quality. I tried rendering it with no changes other than specifying 1080i 29.97 quality. This time it rendered much quicker with a file half the size. Quality was good, but not as good as the first one. I may try uploading this one tomorrow and see what quality options YT gives, and how much perceivable difference in quality there is. I have a second swamp wildlife SS I've finished at 1080i. I may rework it at the higher resolution before posting it to YT. Unfortunately, I'll pretty much have to start from scratch with it.

Quick question. My solution to using vertical images was to resize them to match the height of the horizontals. The issue is that if I apply a motion, such as zoom or pan, PS resizes them to fit the longer width of my horizontal images and cuts off the top and bottom of the vertical image. If I leave it without applying motion, it's just fine. Is there a workaround for this, or is it just a bug of PS.
 
Clovishound

Clovishound

Senior Member
I reworked the second swamp wildlife video at 4K. Took quite a while to render, but uploaded faster than I thought. I was a little hesitant to label it as 4K before it went through the system, but it lists 4K as a quality option.

You were on point, Fred. The 4K looks much better. I may replace the other three with 4K versions. It might not make much difference on a 15 inch laptop screen, but on my external monitor, it really does make a difference.

 
Fred Kingston

Fred Kingston

Senior Member
Yup... If you're gonna post your work... you wanna post the best possible quality, you can... Two programs you might want to consider are Topaz' GigaPixel AI and their Video program... GigaPixel lets you upscale your images... and has a batch mode, so you can batch upscale a set of images to the same resolution...
 
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