How To Make Digital Slide Shows
By Scott Bourne

I know you've experienced it too. You're at a photo convention or camera club meeting and you're anxiously awaiting the slide presentation from a prominent guest lecturer. The lights go down and the first slide pops up on the screen---upside down. The second slide pops up and the presenter says something like, "Oh that's out of order, that is supposed to be number three!" Then the next slide fails to appear at all followed by, you guessed it, another upside down slide. Add to that the typical focus problems and trouble syncing the music. Sound familiar?

This really amazes me. After all, if a bunch of photographers who work with slides every day have all this trouble making a slide presentation, what happens when Grandma fires up her slide projector at home to re-live the glory of her old 1961 Caddy?

For Mac users, polished, glitch-free presentation technology is available. The solution is called iMovie. All you need is:

*Any Apple computer (Starting at $499)

*iMovie software (Included free on all new Macs)

*Scanned images or raw digital files

*Music CDs (Or Garage Band, part of the iLife Suite)

*A way to show the movie

It's easy and versatile.

That's right it is easy! Using iMovie you can import still images, determine how long each image appears on screen, insert transitions between images, and set the whole piece to music. Best of all, you can play the slide show on the Web, on any Mac or PC outfitted with a copy of QuickTime Player or record it to video via Firewire and make VHS or CD video dubs for your friends.

SETTING UP

You need an iMac or other G4/G5 Mac with a copy of iMovie. I suggest running iMovie on a computer with a minimum of 256 Megs of RAM and 20 Megs of hard disk space. If you can get more, that's even better. With iMovie, or any non-linear editing software, memory and hard disk space are prime concerns. Video (even if it is of stills) eats hard disk space like crazy!

Also make sure that you have your monitor resolution set to 800x600 or 1024x768. The higher the monitor resolution, the sharper your iMovie will be. Most importantly DO NOT set your monitor resolution to 640x480, as this will frequently cause iMovie to lock up.

Also very important if you want iMovie to run smoothly: 1. Turn off your Energy Saver control panel 2. Turn Virtual Memory OFF

ADDING IMAGES

When you have decided what images you want to put into your production, you can capture them into iMovie in a number of ways. Assuming you have a digital camera, you need only transfer the images in .jpeg, .GIF, BMP or .pict format to the computer, then load them into iMovie. If your digital camera permits it, be sure to set it to capture at 72 or 96 DPI. Since nearly all monitors are incapable of seeing any more resolution than 96 DPI, it is a waste of time and space to capture at a higher rate. Also make sure to set your camera's gamma according to how you want to display your images. Use 1.8 for PCs and 2.2 for Macs.

If you have images already stored on your hard disk, the most effective way to convert them is to bring them into Photoshop, add a black border around the image. You can easily do this with the canvas size command. I just add a standard one-half inch border to each image. I then resize the image to 640 pixels wide (Make sure the height is 480 or less.) at 96 dpi and save it as a high quality .jpeg. You may also want to bump up your color saturation in each image since the conversion can flatten out the luminance of your images. I typically add about three points of saturation but experiment to get best results.

With that chore done, open iMovie and use the import command to bring in any or all the images you want. iMovie allows you to set a default that controls how long each image will stay on the screen during the show. I selected six seconds for my stills. iMovie puts all the images on a kind of clipboard. You simply drag the images down onto the timeline in the order that you want to present them, and you are one fourth of the way home. The next step is to create any titles that you may want to use for your movie. At a minimum, you may want an opening title screen with the name of your show. At the end, include a credits screen that shows who you are, your copyright notice and anything else you want to include about you or your show.

Next, you will need to create transitions so that the show moves smoothly from one slide to the next. I like the cross-dissolve transition best, but whichever you choose, resist the temptation to use every funky transition iMovie ships with. Just because it is there doesn't mean you have to use it. Less is more in this department.

The final step before saving your slide show/movie is to add music. The web is full of places to download royalty-free music to accompany your show. Try www.mp3.com for a start. The iMovie software also ships with some basic music that is free for you to use, and Apple offers more music downloads at its web site, www.apple.com. You can also use the cool new Apple program called Garage Band to make your own music. Garage Band is included with iMovie in the iLife Suite.

The entire mix is then saved to a digital video camera via Firewire or to a QuickTime movie on your hard disk. Once that's done, you can hook up any standard VHS player to your video camera's AV out and record the movie back to VHS for distribution or you can burn DVDs using Apple's iDVD, also part of the iLife Suite. iMovie also allows you to save movies to CD-ROM and for the Web. Apple's iMovie is so easy to use that you won't even need a manual. I was up and running in minutes.

CONCLUSION

Apple has a hit with iMovie. While Apple never envisioned photographers would use iMovie to create digital slide shows, that is exactly what they are doing. And the results are stunning.

If you're tired of making excuses for a poor slide projector or trying to figure out which side of your transparency faces the screen, use iMovie. On your first try, you will probably end up with the most successful slide show of your life.

For more information go to www.apple.com.

Article Copyright 2005, Scott Bourne - Photofocus Magazine

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Scott Bourne is a professional photographer, author, teacher and pioneer in the digital imaging field. His career started in the early 1970s as a stringer covering motor sports for Associated Press in Indianapolis. Since then, he has shot commercial, portrait, wedding, magazine and fine art assignments. His present passion is wildlife photography.

Scott is the author of "88 Secrets to Selling & Publishing Your Photography" and "88 Secrets to Photoshop for Photographers." Both are available from Olympic Mountain School Press, http://www.mountainschoolpress.com. His work has also appeared in books, magazines, galleries, calendars, on greeting cards, web sites and on posters.

Scott regularly lectures on a variety of photo and media-related subjects. He has appeared on national television and radio programs and has written columns for several national magazines. He is the publisher of Photofocus.com, an online magazine for serious photographers and also runs the Olympic Mountain School of Photography in Gig Harbor, Washington near Seattle.

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