I've been asked to transfer alot of slides to DVD. What program seems the most efficient way of doing this? I have a slide-friendly scanner, and am trying to find the best way to efficiently capture slides and edit them either on a dedicated slide program or in Vegas. Any suggestions??

Thanks!

Barry,

I have been using a program called ProShow Gold to prepare several wedding photo projects with excellent results. It can handle multiple formats, can time the slides to the music or go manual, tweaks problem photos, has multiple scaling types and quality and produces excellent DVD's. I scan my photos in .tiff format, import them into the project for the best results. I also supply the customer with all scanned photos on a seperate disk as an archive of the original photos along with the DVD.

Try the demo at http://www.photodex.com/products/
I think you will be pleased.

Regards,

Mark

Well if you're already using Vegas, by far the easiest way to do the slideshow is to use the incredible Ultimate-S script:

It does a lot more than just sequence photos, but the ease at which it produces slide shows is just incredible.

You can even try it out for free:

http://www.vasst.com/product.aspx?id=c8cec3c4-7ec3-43db-8d32-f703f5050400

Microsoft has a very good free slide show program available called Photo Story. You can get it from http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/digitalphotography/photostory/default.mspx. A review of it can be found at http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1749912,00.asp.

Great--thanks for all your suggestions.

These programs look good in arranging stuff already captured in the computer--but here's another question: how do you best get the slide into the computer? Is the scanner the usual method (I never know if there's something else out there as an alternate); sometimes it requires alot of busy work getting each slide properly sized etc. before it can be put into a program. In dealing with possibly >alot< of slides, I'd like to get them captured and setup for final arrangement as expediently as possible.

Imagebeam had a freeware utility for striping PPT slides out of a presentation and creating JPEGs of them for use in Video, but I can't find the tool on their website now.

In dealing with possibly >alot< of slides, I'd like to get them captured and setup for final arrangement as expediently as possible.
The scanner is the usual method, and would give the best quality. However, one After Effects user on the Adobe User to User forums mentioned that he used a digital camera to take shots of the photos. That would be the fastest method, especially when dealing with large amounts of photos.

Imagebeam had a freeware utility for striping PPT slides out of a presentation and creating JPEGs of them for use in Video, but I can't find the tool on their website now.
Is this the utility you had in mind? http://stream.imagebeam.com/tools/powerpointimageexporter/

Yeah, I know what you mean. With Ultimate S and Video, formatting the project is a breeze, but scanning in all those photos takes forever. I wish there was a machine where you could dump a bunch of pictures, slides or negatives in a bin and it would scan the whole bunch!

Is this the utility you had in mind? http://stream.imagebeam.com/tools/powerpointimageexporter/

That's exactly what I was referring to. I have the utility and use it. Thanks Christopher!

Thank you for mentioning the program. It could come in real handy someday.

As Christopher mentioned, Microsoft Photo Story 3 is excellent, although it only outputs WMV files. I've used it for a few projects and found that sharper results on DVD were acheived by using the 1024x768 template instead of the NTSC 640x480 template. I am guessing that my video editor (Vegas 6) does a better job of converting larger pictures to MPEG2 than does Photo Story 3.

Another great program is Ulead DVD Picture Show 4, which now also writes to
video files. Though, it's not freeware.

I have scanned over 10 thousand slides in the last year. I have had up to 6 thousand to manage in one project. This amount of slides crashed lots of programs. I scanned them at the highest quality jpeg level. I think Tiff is overkill for thousands of slides, might work for hundreds of slides. Iphoto and photoshop light crashed with more than 1000 pics loaded. I needed that many at a time so I could organize them properly. I have a Nikon scanner that came with software that could handle 1000's of pics without crashing much.

OK here is the meat on the bone.

Most dvd players made in the last 2 years can play jpeg pics in a slide mode with customized music. Just read the manual of one of these dvd players and they can tell you how to build the cd. yes, that is the catch. Very few but the highest end DVD players recognize jpegs on dvd but they play them on cd's no problem. Most let you add the music. I have sent dozens of these cd's to relatives and friends with no problems. The cheapest dvd players with off brand names have problems but that should not be an issue with Sony players at less than $80 bucks at Walmart. Some of my cousins have had to upgrade DVD players but they needed to.

This is the most efficient way of putting pics on a DVD player if you have more than a 1000 pics. I have had folks play these on HD plasmas in awe of the quality. Medium sized Jpeg files can do the trick. Major downside, you can only use cd, which have a fraction of the storage potential of dvds.

If you do it right you can include a mp3 file to play during the music too.

Check some of the Nikon scanner threads for more info on managing 1000's of slides, I felt that render times and overwhelming amount of slides justified finding a solution other than a NLE.

I knew this wasn't the simplest of issues.


;)

Yeah, I know what you mean. With Ultimate S and Video, formatting the project is a breeze, but scanning in all those photos takes forever. I wish there was a machine where you could dump a bunch of pictures, slides or negatives in a bin and it would scan the whole bunch!
Not for slides, but one of my scanners has a photo feeder.

I can put a stack of pics in the top and it'll automatically scan them all. It's been great.

Not for slides, but one of my scanners has a photo feeder.

I can put a stack of pics in the top and it'll automatically scan them all. It's been great.


Bryan - what brand/model of scanner are you using?

with the slide attatchment that holds 50 slides. It jams but it is one of the best slide feeder/scanner combos. Digital Ice is NICE, comes with it.

It is sweet and worth every penny, got my set-up on ebay at half price. Many folks buy the scanner and slide feeder then sell it after they are done, they are always available on ebay and some package them together. Probally a little over $1000 bucks. You can also scan negative film. The quality is tops. I personally don't ever want to see another slide ever again, after 10,000 I have had enough, it is very time consuming. You will also like the Nikon program because you can scale 1000,s of slides at once. very important when you have 3000 slides that has to go on one set of cds, you can figure if they have a HD plasma or SD box and scale your pics accordingly.