A shortcut with good results.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been banging away at an iDVD project. The goal is to show still images from my helicopter tours and excursions as slide shows with music. I’m rather picky about these things and decided that I wanted to use the Ken Burns effect with a dissolve transition to add motion to my slide shows. That means I can’t simply use the Slide Show feature in iDVD.
Let me take a moment to discuss the scope of this project. Back in October, I took the Southwest Circle Helicopter Adventure with professional photographer Richard Noll. Richard took just under 1000 still images and several hours of video. I took about 400 still pictures. After deciding that I simply didn’t have time to go through all the video, I settled on the nearly 1400 photos plus about 200 I had already in stock for the area.
The first task was weeding out the junk. Like 30 pictures of ducks and fish swimming together in Lake Powell. And duplicates of shots that differ only in exposure. It took me about 4 hours to narrow down the library to 358 photos.
Then I discovered that there’s some kind of bug in iMovie HD that makes the Ken Burns effect controls choke on images over a certain resolution. Of course, Richard’s camera shot everything at 10 megapixels. That meant cropping or down-sampling his photos for the job. Even then, iMovie was acting unreliably.
I was getting nowhere fast and quickly running out of time.
I burned a DVD with two movies on it. I wasn’t very happy with the results.
There had to be a better way.
Long story short: I stumbled upon the Send to iDVD command in iPhoto. I soon discovered that this command exports an iPhoto slide show (which is infinitely easier to put together than an iMovie slide show) as a high resolution QuickTime move. That movie can be imported into iMovie or iDVD.
So since about 1 PM today, I’ve been knocking out slideshow movies. I’m creating them on my MacBook Pro and sending them over the network to my dual G5 where I’m adding them to an iMovie project. I’ve done seven slideshow movies so far and have three more to go. Looks like I might actually finish today.
More details on request. Use the Comments link.
On August 19, 2008 at 6:16 am, 
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On August 14, 2008 at 3:21 am, 
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5 responses so far ↓
1 Lauren // Mar 18, 2007 at 7:00 pm
I’d like to know more! Can you post the details or send them to me by email?
2 Maria Langer // Mar 19, 2007 at 1:06 pm
I wrote the article today. You can find it at http://www.marialanger.com/2007/03/19/creating-a-slide-show-for-idvd-with-iphoto/
3 Ileana // Nov 5, 2007 at 10:50 am
Hi Maria,
I have this wierd problem and thought maybe you knew something that could help me. I was working in iMovie and received a warning message that I was trying to render two transitions at the same time and that I had to wait until the first transition ended its render before I continued. So I did. But it seems that this operation corrupted the clipboard or pasteboard and it won’t let me add atransition in that same space anymore.
The console reports the following: iMovie HD[195] Looked for URLs on the pasteboard, but found none. Can you give me a clue on this? Please?
Thank you very much for your help and greeting from Mexico.
4 Maria Langer // Nov 5, 2007 at 11:07 am
Sorry, but I have no idea why this happened of how you can fix it. Have you tried contacting Apple support or posting a message in the Apple Support forums? The response in the forums is sometimes pretty good.
Good luck!
5 Shelley // Mar 13, 2008 at 12:00 pm
Hi Maria — I’ve created a DVD in iDVD that includes two separate slideshows, each with a song attached to it. I can’t find any info on whether or not I can connect the slideshows so that they play one right after the other without having to hit a menu selection. Did you try to do this and/or can you point me to any sources of potential help? Thanks.
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