Sunday, October 17, 2004


QuickTime slideshows with iLife: Good; Better; Best.

iPhoto's role in the iLife suite of applications has been greatly enhanced -- and its overall usefulness increased -- by the abilities of iMovie and iDVD to share more directly the iPhoto library. These are important capabilities for those of us using iLife since iPhoto's native ability to share its photos through QuickTime is, by comparison, lacking.

The reason we, as iLife users, have gone through the trouble of storing digitial photos in the iPhoto application is because we'd like to share those images with others. Perhaps we'd like to share our images through traditional photographic prints. Perhaps it's through a web page. Many of us -- myself included -- like the idea of publishing tidy slideshows, complete with music, to QuickTime for viewing by others on a website or other distribution methods. It would be nice to have greater power and flexibility in sharing slidehshows in this method than presently offered by iPhoto. I put a more robust QuickTime export at the top of my list for iPhoto improvements.

In iPhoto, it is, of course, posssible to create a QuickTime version of iPhoto's elegant on-screen slideshow feature. The resultant QuickTime file can be shared via e-mail, the Internet or through CD. Unfortunately, the QuickTime version created by iPhoto lacks the ability to properly pace photos to the length of musical accompanyment or to, at least, fade the music out as the QuickTime file approaches its end. What you're left with is a slideshow that quits abrubtly, stopping not only on the last photo but cutting off the music when the photos end. This can be a bit jarring for anyone looking to create a neat user experience and a bit jarring to users who suddenly find themsleves at the end of a slideshow without visual or audio clues that the slideshow is appaoching its conclusion. Luckily, with a bit of simple math, iPhoto can be used to produce a tidy QuickTime slideshow keeping labor to a minimum.

Good: Tweeking iPhoto:
To produce a QuickTime slideshow that matches the pace of photos to the length of a muscial accompanyment, try this method:

  • Once you've selected a piece of music through the "Slideshow" button in iPhoto, convert the length (or "Time") of the piece to seconds. In my example, I've selected Jimmy Buffett's "Trip Around the Sun." The mp3 file is listed as three minutes and 19 seconds, or 199 total seconds.
  • Subtract one second for every photo in your intended slideshow. This takes into account the one second cross-fade transistion used by iPhoto when it exports your QuickTime file. In my example, that's 39 seconds for the 39 photos I've selected. 199 total seconds minus 39 seconds leaves me with a count of 160 seconds.
  • Subtract two more seconds for the fade in and fade out and the beginning and end of the slideshow that iPhoto produces. Remaining count: 158 seconds.
  • Divide the total remaining seconds (158) by the number of photos, or slides. In this example 158 seconds divided by 39 photos renders a per slide time of 4.05 seconds when rounded to the nearest hundreth of a second. Enter that number in the "Display image for..." field under the "File/Export.../QuickTime" menu option in iPhoto.
  • Set the other options of the dialogue box to your choosing, making sure to check the option for "Add currently selected music to movie." Export your slidehshow.
    What you have is a slideshow built to the length of your musical selection.

    Better: iDVD as slideshow creator
    An alternative to the iPhoto QuickTime export is to use the iDVD button under the "Organize" button to send your photo selections to the iDVD application. iDVD preserves the characteristics of your iPhoto slideshow, including your musical selection. The resultant slideshow in iDVD, however, goes beyond iPhoto's offering by giving you the ability to tweak the slideshow by adjusting transitions or by adjusting the "slide duration" to a specific time measurement or to the useful "Fit to Audio" option. This "Fit to Audio" feature measures the length of musical accompanyment and adjusts the slide time of each photo so that all photos are displayed within the length of the chosen song(s).

    While iDVD improves upon the iPhoto slideshow option, it is not perfect. First, when you use the iDVD button within iPhoto, your slideshow is opened in iDVD on top of whatever iDVD project you were last working on. Probably not what you had in mind. The work around for this is to open iDVD prior to doing your iPhoto export and creating a new project. Secondly, true to the nature of the application, your newly created slideshow can be shared with others only if your were planning to burn a DVD for distribution.

    A more useful, albeit more labor intensive, work around for obtaining better QuickTime exports from your iPhoto selections is to use iMovie.

    iMovie as slideshow creator
    One method of using iMovie to improve upon iPhoto's QuickTime slideshows is to import the QuickTime file from iPhoto into iMovie.

    A better method for creating slideshows is to, in effect, rebuild the iPhoto slideshow within iMovie. Again, this is more labor intensive but worth the effort if you prefer varying transitions between photos, use of the "Ken Burns Effect" or properly paced slides fit the length of selected pieces of music.

    A third-party alternative

    posted by Erik @ 2:11 PM 23 comments

    • Thursday, September 30, 2004


    640 x 480 and the 40-pixel buffer principle

    The finished works of many iMovie users are destined only for viewings on the small screens of our computers or our televisions.

    When it comes to creating graphic images for those movies (for example: background images over which titles will play, or matte images for logos or bluescreen effects) you'll get the best results when using the proper dimensions for the small screen format and by employing the 40-pixel buffer principle.

    While NTSC and PAL formats require a screen size of 720x480 and 720x576 respectively, iMovie files destined for QuickTime, iDVD or tape playback require a screen dimension of 640 pixels wide x 480 pixels deep.

    Because televisions have the tendency to "cut off" the outer pixels of your movie, images or graphic elements within approximately 40 pixels of the edge of your iMovie screen may not be visible when viewed on a television. Therefore, make sure to make the graphic images used in iMovie are "television safe."

    This can easily be accomplished by pulling in from the edges of your 640 x 480 full screen size a full 40 pixels from both width and height. This makes your effective "live image" area the center 600 x 440 pixels of the full-screen size. If you want the entirety of an image or graphic element visible to the viewer (for example: a logo or a title) make sure it exists within the 600 x 440 border.

    posted by Erik @ 8:11 AM 4 comments