Trial Version Banner

[nancyandbob Profile Private message]

I just created my first hopefully max quality DVD show from a bunch of TIF files. The menus display full width on monitor, as expected. The expected yellow banner also runs full width, but the actual slides only occupy about 75 - 80% of the width of the screen. If I opt to buy, will the slides then run full width?

More questions coming, undoubtedly! Busy comparing with Magix, whose zoom feature leaves a lot to be desired.

[gpsmikey Profile Private message]

As far as I know, only the banner is different in the trial version. You left out a couple of details in your post like what you are displaying the show on (is it 16:9 or 4:3 aspect ratio (4:3 is the old TV while 16:9 is wide-screen). When you create a show, you can select the format - either 16:9 or the 4:3 - you also have a number of options as to how to "fit" the image to the slide (fit, stretch, fill etc) - recognize that most cameras shoot in 4:3 and if you are using fit, then to get the whole image in the slide, the sides get cropped. Hope that helps

mikey

[nancyandbob Profile Private message]

Thanks. It dawned on me that I should have said I was aiming at 16:9. Wondered what else I left out.

I'm trying to create DVDs for my three adult kids for 1968 - ~1990 from TIFs created by scanning about 2,500 slides. Each TIF is about 65MB, scanned to max res. Creating a video version of a set of scrap books. Really want menus by year, and within that, by subject. Figured out a way to do it in Magix by tweaking their menus; not perfect, but it works.

On the other hand, I don't like the way they do Zooms. ProShow runs circles around them in that regard. Trying to decide which system is best. Even testing Pinnacle, which doesn't seem to want to access my internal D: drive, where the TIFs are arranged in about 250 folders / subfolders.

[gpsmikey Profile Private message]

OK, "Fill Frame" is most likely the option you are looking for. Recognize that since the images don't match the 16:9 aspect ratio, they will typically get the top and bottom cropped off so that the image "fills" the frame. Your typical 35mm slide image is going to be 24*36mm giving you a 3:2 ratio so something has to give. Recognize also that assuming you are using a standard DVD (not BlueRay), in NTSC land, the max resolution is 720*480 - this is not a proshow issue - it is the standard for the DVD. I think in your case, I would seriously consider resizing those images down to a more manageable size (and they will be much less likely to cause issues when creating the shows). The free Irfanview can batch resize all the images for you very easily (and rename the output in the process so you are not modifying the originals -- I tend to run the batch and append the long dimension to the name in the process - mypix.jpg becomes mypix_2048px.jpg for example.

mikey

[DickK Profile Private messageWebsite]

The menu structure you're describing can be done but not easily. But before worrying that issue, I'd start by figuring out how to group the images in some logical way. With 2500 images running across 22 years, you have roughly 100 images per year. 100 images will make a slide show that's about right -- around 10 minutes -- so, doing a year-by-year show is very feasible.

A few side notes:
1. So, how to estimate how long a show will go? The rule of thumb I use is 6secs @ image, based on 3.5s visible, 2.5s transition. No need or desire to be exact, some slides will have multiple images, some slides will need more time or less time, I'll have an intro and outtro on the show -- when all is done, it usually comes out within 10-20% of my rough estimate and that's good enough. So, 100 images is roughly 10 minutes.
2. Another rule of thumb is that unless you want the audience napping during the show, 10-12 minutes is a good target with 20 minutes as my absolute limit of tolerance.
3. A slide show DVD with high quality output is 60 min of video. Applying the 10min = 100 images rule means 600 images on a DVD. It could actually be double that or half that, but in any case 2500 images, will need more than one DVD.

Okay, back to your questions. You also mentioned "by subject" and that might mean you won't want a chronological grouping. That's also doable again provided you keep the number of images in each show to a reasonable number (true no matter how you organize them), but the problem is that you really can't do both with ProShow. ProShow isn't designed to be DVD authoring software so you can't set up nested menus or chapters. You have one flat layer of menus per DVD although several shows can be on the DVD and included on the menu. It is possible to take the output from ProShow and feed it to other software to do some of that but you need that other software and need to learn to use it.

The normal advice to people is to leave the images alone and not shrink them for ProShow. In your case, however, with that many images of that rather extreme size, I agree with Mikey. Trying to process those could bring your machine to its proverbial knees so running them through an editor to convert to JPG format would be wise. These are slide scans done at fairly high pixel-per-inch values and as a result you can impose a lot of limitations and still get results that as good as standard definition video can handle.

On the issue of the aspect ratio, two comments. First, you've got the usual problem dealing with photographs -- a mismatch no matter what you do. Modern TVs are 16:9, old TVs are 4:3 and both of those are options in ProShow. Your images are 3:2 which cannot exactly match either one without cropping, or alternatively, black bars somewhere. At this point, going for the widescreen 16:9 is probably the best choice. But your images are proportioned closer to square than the widescreen format. That means either you lose image at the top & bottom or you end up with black bars on the sides of the slides. If you want to fill the screen, you'll have to do something to make it happen. The good news is that the choice is yours, the bad news is you have to choose Second, related to this issue is the setting for "safe zone." Old TVs had a lot of overscan and the safe zone was a way to keep the image where it would actually be displayed. New TVs have far less of this, some will claim there's no overscan but that rarely true. ProShow's default setting, however, is way to large if you're planning for a flat-screen TV for viewing. Every TV is different but I've found by experiment that 1-2% is pretty safe and leaving it at the default is also adding black bars top and bottom on most TVs which just compounds the problem of the aspect ratio mismatch.

Hope that wasn't to overwhelming and helps!
Dick

[nancyandbob Profile Private message]

I really appreciate the comments and advice.

Since I used to live (or die, sometimes) with PC files in a work environment, I'm probably something of a fanatic for creating directory structures that are meaningful. So no surprise, that the first level directory structure for the slides is by Year (i.e.: 1968, 1969, and so on). Then comes some sort of chronologically-ordered subject classification, like "01 - Winter", "02 - New Dog", "03 - Western Vacation". In a few cases, like the Vacation, there may even be subfolders within that.

Part of the anticipated approach is taking each low-level directory and creating a min show, perhaps outputing that to a High Def file of some sort, then eventually pulling those together into a master show, covering however many years a DVD will accomodate. Hopefully, that will reduce the strain of trying to process a couple hundred 65 MB TIFs at the same time.

While the monitor I'm working with is 1280 x 1024 (4:5), the kids all have monitors that are some sort of wide screen, and of course some of their TVs are 16:9 HD units (like ours). So the end product needs to accomodate that. I expect that I'll tell them what ratio they should use when playing DVD on PC. Maybe tht will be part of the pre-show.

Again, thanks, and I'll continue to welcome comments.

[gpsmikey Profile Private message]

I think you missed my point when discussing resolution - if you are creating a standard DVD, the resolution is 720*480 in the output format on the DVD. You can't do any better than that since that is the standard for a DVD. There are ways around it such as creating an mp4 file and putting that on a dvd as a data file or going to blueray, but for a standard DVD, it doesn't matter how good the screen resolution is, you are limited to the 720*480 for NTSC. Now, if you are playing on a newer DVD player connected to a TV via HDMI, the image will be up-sampled to the resolution of the display, but the bottle neck is at 720*480 on the DVD.

See http://www.videohelp.com/dvd for more info on the sizes and resolutions for a DVD.

mikey

[DickK Profile Private messageWebsite]

Good point, Mikey. And 720x480 is 3:2 in aspect ratio. Which means the DVD image rendered by ProShow isn't going to match the display, which is why normal DVDs will always display with black bars on a widescreen TV and if the black bars aren't there, then the TV or the player adjusted it to suit the display.

Bottom line is simply that if a standard DVD is your output, you're limited in resolution and you may or may not get the black bars depending on how the TV or DVD player is set up--how the show looks on the TV is mostly out of your control when you make the show. Usually it will end up looking pretty good though.

Dick