Video/Slide Show for Live Performance
 

A friend of ours with a tribute band has a gig in about two months for which he wants to project a slide-show kind of image on a large rearscreen system behind the performers. He wants us to create individual slide shows for each song (approximately 3.5 to 4 minutes in length) that can be slowed down or speeded up to take varying performance lengths into account.

I'm wondering how something like this would be accomplished and controled. Create Ken Burns effects, save to QuickTime? Drop into an application like Keynote or PowerPoint?

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks!

Leigh

Here's how I would do it...
Make the slide show into a .mov or .avi for each song and import it into Protools, Sonar, Logic... any audio/midi editor that can playback the video file. Then you need either a click track or some audio or midi playing to keep the band locked to the timing of the video. Bands tend to rush in live concerts, this could help with that too... If they have a keyboard player the software should be able to follow his playing and adjust the timing as needed.
Just a quick thought, it might not work, but worth a try?
$.02

Chris,

Thanks for the info.

What application would you play back the slide show/video in? I think we're looking for something that allows the visuals to be speed up and slowed down to accommodate the performers.

Or are you saying that with a click track it can be automatically synchronized?

Leigh

You can have the video play back from the audio app in full screen mode to a projector.
What I described helps the performers to stay in sync with the video, not the other way around.

Media Shout.....
 

Leigh:

Check out Media Shout:
www.mediashout.com

Many churches and other groups use it for live presentations. It supports a wide range of formats, and when used with a computer that has two vga heads, it has a control screen that is very flexable. It will allow you as the controler to follow what the band is doing, or lead them.

There is a learning curve but once learned it is very easy to control and work with.

Powerpoint 2003 now has a control screen too, but MediaShout will allow you to make changes on the fly, insert material on the fly and then return to where the original script was when you left it, over all much better than power point. There are other software like it out there, but I have used Mediashout and have really liked it.

Good luck!

Randy

just make each slide a minute or two longer than each song.. that way if the song runs long theres video to cover it.. and if it goes short than noone will notice anything. just switch the slideshow after every song.

PowerPoint would work well for this sort of application. You can pre-record timings for the transitions in the show or associate transitions to specific points in the music and have the sound or lighting board operator advance the images by hand.

Leigh,
How about this. You can export the slideshows as Quicktime movies and use an app like MotionDive, here is a link for it http://www.digitalstage.net/en/

Just make the movies longer than you will need in case the songs goes long and then just fade it out and mix in the next slideshow. You can even let the slideshow loop and let it run longer if you don't want to make a long slideshow. Check out this link as well if you are interested in MotionDive since you will need a scan converter and they talk about this software in more detail. http://www.vjforums.com/