Hi
OSX has a nice feature to show slideshows in iPhoto or from the finder, or Mail.app... but I would like to have it output a movie file and use it in Final Cut Pro, etc. Is there some slick way to do that, either with OSX or using some shareware?
Thanks@!
Easy video slideshows on Mac? YES!
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zbandito
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Easy video slideshows on Mac? YES!
Last edited by zbandito on Sun Aug 13, 2006 11:38 pm 0, edited 1 time in total.
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zbandito
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hmm, good point, I'll have to look at that when I get back to the office.. although I'm hoping to not have to keyframe anything -- it sounds really lazy but it's really just a matter of having to process a bunch of images before tomorrow and being a bit tight on time to animate everything by hand.. I was thinking of putting photos into iPhoto, running slideshow on a powerbook and output SVideo to a DV deck; this should work fine except that being DV footage it will be recompressed and probably show artifacts in the final .m2v destined for a DVD-R. So some little quartz image script that outputs an uncompressed .mov would be great, but I can't spend all night digging out versiontracker.com either... any other additional ideas? 
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zbandito
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iPhoto 5, baby.
Well Apeture is supposed to have a more advanced slideshow feature, but it doesn't even do the 'Ken Burns' effect (which I hate calling it, as it's such a basic and obvious thing that people have been doing for decades before some dude attached his name to it). So that didn't work.
I searched around macosxhints.org to see about some inner settings in iPhoto, trying to gain more control over what it outputs. I noticed a post about changing settings to get smaller filesizes -- I wanted larger, uncompressed files if possible.
What I found is this; iPhoto 2006 can export slideshows with Ken Burns; it does so at either 320x240 or 640x480, mp4. Pretty decent, but it's not a full DV frame (720x480 NTSC) so that meant either stretching the image or accepting less than full frame imagery. MP4 has to be reencoded and it is a lossy encoder so that is less than ideal but I haven't found any other way to export.
iPhoto2 is installed on our old G4; it will output slideshows as well but no Ken Burns effect. Interestingly, instead of MP4 or MPEG, it apparently creates Quicktime files that are basically encapsulated still images with instructions for quicktime to crossfade/dissolve the images at certain times (every 5 seconds, with a 1 second crossfade, for example). It may be possible to import these files into FCP or even Quicktime Pro and render them out uncompressed but as there is no automated Ken Burns it's not an ideal option.
Poking around, I found iPhoto 5 on our G5. This will also output a slideshow movie in MP4 with Ken Burns, at a full 720x480. The MP4 is encoded at a pretty high data rate so even though it's lossy compressed it still looks pretty good after getting transcoded to m2v (DVD).
So, first I dropped the images into Apeture 1.1.1 (this update is key as it fixes a bug in the crop tool handling, making Apeture the fastest way to discretely crop multiple images to a set aspect ratio that I know of) and set the crop to 4:3 aspect ratio. Then I cropped any vertically (portrait) oriented pictures to this aspect ratio. Thus when iPhoto automated the Ken Burns effect it keeps a full frame image -- uncropped portrait images will normally display with a black background around them that I did not want in this project.
Then output the group of images from Apeture to a folder, drop that into iPhoto and export the slideshow, which can then be manipulated to will.
Of note, however, is that MP4 to DV (and possibly to any codec) transcoding is fairly broken on intel Macs. It works but it's very very slow, and is a known issue. I learned about this when reading some notes and benchmarks about the new Mac Pro systems.
Anyway hope this helps someone..
it's not perfect but if you have well framed photos it's a great timesaver. $
Well Apeture is supposed to have a more advanced slideshow feature, but it doesn't even do the 'Ken Burns' effect (which I hate calling it, as it's such a basic and obvious thing that people have been doing for decades before some dude attached his name to it). So that didn't work.
I searched around macosxhints.org to see about some inner settings in iPhoto, trying to gain more control over what it outputs. I noticed a post about changing settings to get smaller filesizes -- I wanted larger, uncompressed files if possible.
What I found is this; iPhoto 2006 can export slideshows with Ken Burns; it does so at either 320x240 or 640x480, mp4. Pretty decent, but it's not a full DV frame (720x480 NTSC) so that meant either stretching the image or accepting less than full frame imagery. MP4 has to be reencoded and it is a lossy encoder so that is less than ideal but I haven't found any other way to export.
iPhoto2 is installed on our old G4; it will output slideshows as well but no Ken Burns effect. Interestingly, instead of MP4 or MPEG, it apparently creates Quicktime files that are basically encapsulated still images with instructions for quicktime to crossfade/dissolve the images at certain times (every 5 seconds, with a 1 second crossfade, for example). It may be possible to import these files into FCP or even Quicktime Pro and render them out uncompressed but as there is no automated Ken Burns it's not an ideal option.
Poking around, I found iPhoto 5 on our G5. This will also output a slideshow movie in MP4 with Ken Burns, at a full 720x480. The MP4 is encoded at a pretty high data rate so even though it's lossy compressed it still looks pretty good after getting transcoded to m2v (DVD).
So, first I dropped the images into Apeture 1.1.1 (this update is key as it fixes a bug in the crop tool handling, making Apeture the fastest way to discretely crop multiple images to a set aspect ratio that I know of) and set the crop to 4:3 aspect ratio. Then I cropped any vertically (portrait) oriented pictures to this aspect ratio. Thus when iPhoto automated the Ken Burns effect it keeps a full frame image -- uncropped portrait images will normally display with a black background around them that I did not want in this project.
Then output the group of images from Apeture to a folder, drop that into iPhoto and export the slideshow, which can then be manipulated to will.
Of note, however, is that MP4 to DV (and possibly to any codec) transcoding is fairly broken on intel Macs. It works but it's very very slow, and is a known issue. I learned about this when reading some notes and benchmarks about the new Mac Pro systems.
Anyway hope this helps someone..
it's not perfect but if you have well framed photos it's a great timesaver. $