Maria’s Guides

A shortcut with good results.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been banging away at an iDVD project. The goal is to show still images from my helicopter tours and excursions as slide shows with music. I’m rather picky about these things and decided that I wanted to use the Ken Burns effect with a dissolve transition to add motion to my slide shows. That means I can’t simply use the Slide Show feature in iDVD.

Let me take a moment to discuss the scope of this project. Back in October, I took the Southwest Circle Helicopter Adventure with professional photographer Richard Noll. Richard took just under 1000 still images and several hours of video. I took about 400 still pictures. After deciding that I simply didn’t have time to go through all the video, I settled on the nearly 1400 photos plus about 200 I had already in stock for the area.

The first task was weeding out the junk. Like 30 pictures of ducks and fish swimming together in Lake Powell. And duplicates of shots that differ only in exposure. It took me about 4 hours to narrow down the library to 358 photos.

Then I discovered that there’s some kind of bug in iMovie HD that makes the Ken Burns effect controls choke on images over a certain resolution. Of course, Richard’s camera shot everything at 10 megapixels. That meant cropping or down-sampling his photos for the job. Even then, iMovie was acting unreliably.

I was getting nowhere fast and quickly running out of time.

I burned a DVD with two movies on it. I wasn’t very happy with the results.

There had to be a better way.

Long story short: I stumbled upon the Send to iDVD command in iPhoto. I soon discovered that this command exports an iPhoto slide show (which is infinitely easier to put together than an iMovie slide show) as a high resolution QuickTime move. That movie can be imported into iMovie or iDVD.

So since about 1 PM today, I’ve been knocking out slideshow movies. I’m creating them on my MacBook Pro and sending them over the network to my dual G5 where I’m adding them to an iMovie project. I’ve done seven slideshow movies so far and have three more to go. Looks like I might actually finish today.

More details on request. Use the Comments link.