So, I agreed to put together a slide show sort of thing for a friend’s wedding. I thought I knew what I was getting into, but it turns out maybe I didn’t: I can manage about a half-dozen different ways of getting it almost right, but I can’t quite get it to work completely right.
The requirements: I have 57 pictures of the bride and groom. These should be displayed in an continual-playing, looping show. They will be displayed on an old big-screen TV, hooked up to a DVD player. There is a particular song that should be playing in the background, so the length of the slide show should be the same as the length of the song.
The tools I have available are Keynote, iMovie, and iDVD, running on OSX Mavericks 10.9.4 . The closest I’ve been able to come is to construct the slide show directly in iMovie, which lets me meet all of the stated requirements… but it puts the pictures in a black background, which is very noticeable during transitions, and because of the way the pictures were scanned in, most of them would look much better with a white background. I have not been able to find any way to change this background color.
Alternately, I can construct a slideshow in Keynote that looks exactly how I want it to look. I can then export it to a movie, which I could put in iMovie to add the soundtrack… except that, when exporting the slide show to a movie, it automatically rounds the time-per-frame to the nearest second, which causes the slideshow to come out the wrong length.
I assume that either way, I’m going to have to eventually use iDVD to burn it to a disc, but I figure I can worry about that after I have the movie file created.
It took me a while to figure out how to do this, but you can make a white background for vertical shots in iMovie 10.0.5 this way:
Drag your vertical clips to the top line of the movie editor.
Go to the Maps and Backgrounds list.
Select White.
Drag the white clip under the vertical clip.
Select the vertical clip, choose Picture-in-Picture, and adjust the position handles to fill the screen as you see fit. The white background should fill the rest of the frame.
Hm, it appears that my iMovie is 8.0.6, not 10.0.5. It doesn’t seem to have a “top line” of the editor-- It’s all one line, and I can’t find anything in the Help for picture-in-picture. Is this easily/cheaply upgradable, or is there a way to do it in the older version?
If you don’t have too many verticals, you can just edit them in a photo editor (Photoshop comes to mind, but The GIMP will do), and turn them into landscapes, adding whatever background you desire. This might end up being the fastest way do get this job done.
I considered that, but it’s still not quite ideal. The transitions I’m using now have the new image starting small in the middle of the old one, and expanding to fill the screen. Right now, the image that starts small has black bars attached to it. I could manually edit the images to have white bars there, but what I’d really prefer would be no bars at all as it’s growing, and a white background overall.
On thinking about it some more, though, that doesn’t really make sense… If I have a landscape image and I’m transitioning to a portrait, when do I want the sides of the landscape to disappear? I guess maybe I need to think about this a little more, and figure out exactly what I want before I figure out how to do it. Maybe I should just switch to a different transition, too.
I think you need to mess around with the cropping handles. I don’t have a copy of 8.0.6 to play with, but there should be a way to select what area is being zoomed.