How to … Digital Photography - 1 - Slideshows With Digital cameras becoming more affordable for a reasonable quality of picture, many photographers are abandoning their film cameras. The down side to this is that where formerly all photographs taken as negatives on film were printed, even though many of the pictures processed never made it to the family album. Those who specialised in taking their photographs on films for slides fared slightly worse. Although all the photographs made into the slide format, there was no means of showing the pictures to others except by investing in a slide projector and screen and then projecting the pictures in a darkened room Some photographic processing houses did offer a process of transferring selected slides to prints on paper, but this was expensive and the paper pictures never lived up to the vibrancy of colour and sharpness of the slide. Although many more pictures are taken when using a digital camera (because you will never run out of film) very few of the results make it to the printed stage, languishing either in the camera’s memory chip or stored on the family computer until dictates of space require their removal. Storing them on CDs or DVDs, while retaining the images for around 40 years means that the literally thousands of pictures may never be viewed again. Help is, however at hand. There are websites available on the internet into which you may upload your digital photographs into a ‘virtual photograph album’. You can then email others with the access information and they can then connect to the website and view the pictures on their computer screens. But what if the viewer doesn’t have a computer. Use the alternative – programs exist to enable you to burn your pictures onto a CD or DVD and then view them either on a television set via a DVD player or alternatively use your computer to view the pictures on-screen. These programs exist in four formats. 1. Computer only programs. These programs will enable you to assemble the slideshow on your computer, save it and then display it later using the same software. However others cannot view your pictures on their computers unless they have the same software program that you used to create the slide. Microsoft Powerpoint falls into this category. Also the CD or DVD cannot display pictures on a DVD player to be shown on a TV. 2. Computer only but includes program. There are programs around that you can use to assemble slide shows and include a viewer program on the same CD or DVD as the pictures. Anyone with a computer simply inserts the CD or DVD into their computer and the pictures will be displayed automatically using the viewer program that is on the CD. . Again the CD or DVD cannot display pictures on a DVD player to be shown on a TV. 3. Slide show on a CD or DVD. Programs exist that will put your pictures on a CD or DVD in such a manner that they can be played either on a computer or on a standard DVD player with the pictures displayed onscreen. When transferring the pictures to the CD or DVD they can be programmed to either change automatically to the next picture after a fixed time interval, or alternatively they will only change when the remote control on the DVD player asks for the next picture. This method of storage is very efficient in terms of the space taken up on the CD or DVD because they are stored as ‘still’ images. 4. Slide Show Movie with/without sound. This final group is the most flexible of the lot for it allows you to vary the amount of time that each individual picture is displayed on-screen. A narrative and/or music can be added turning the whole presentation into a ‘sound movie made up from stills’. And the entire production can be burned on a CD or DVD. The movie can then be displayed on a computer or alternatively on a standard DVD player and the pictures viewed on the TV screen. Your digital camera probably came with software programs which falls partially into one or more of the above categories. Programs do exist costing anything from £25 to upwards of £60 which will do most of the above, and fortunately many of these are available for download over the Internet as Shareware. This means that you can try the program out to see if it suits your requirements before you purchase it. A few of the choices on the program may not be available until you do decide to buy. Finally the program may expire after a certain number of uses or a period of time. For this demonstration a program called “Sonic MYDVD and Slideshow” will be used to demonstrate the construction of a slide show categorised as ‘type 3’ above. This program came with a Computer magazine as a free cover disk and is Version 5 of the program. Newer versions exist which offer more choices. Note that this version only burns CDs ! One of the attractive features of this program is that everything your require is ‘in house’ and on the program. From collecting and sorting the pictures, adding titles and grouping the sets of pictures into sections through to burning the production on a CD which can be put in a standard domestic DVD player and the pictures viewed on a TV.

So lets get on with the Show …. 1

It will prove useful later on if you have everything stored in one location on your computer. This will include the pictures you are going to use, the ‘work in progress’ file produced by the program and all other ancillary files produced in the process of constructing the CD. Open up ‘My Computer’, right-click and make a new folder with a suitable name, say ‘Slide Show 2007’. This will be the store for all the bits associated with this presentation. There are going to be two parts to this slide show. So open up this new folder and add two sub-folders. Let’s call these ‘Canada 2003’ and ‘Iona’. Open up the source of the ‘Canada’ pictures and drag them across to the new folder. Repeat the exercise by dragging the ‘Iona’ pictures into the Iona folder. Time to start the program. Click on the ‘MyDVD Slideshow’ icon and you’ll see this screen:

The Tutorial is worth a look, as is the Help file. But for now click on ‘ Create or Modify …’ and you will see the next screen As always, having started, make sure that you save this new file at this point. Choose a memorable name ‘Holidays 2003’ for instance and save this file in the same main folder as you transferred the pictures to Note that if the ‘Burn’ button is not bright red but greyed out, then you will need to install additional software as your machine needs to be brought up to date. This screen is the first screen that your future viewer will see and it will eventually contain the menu for the various sections of your slide show. The first task will be to add a title to the screen. Click on the wording “Click here….” And type in some short sentence that will introduce your show. For this example the wording “Holidays in 2003” will be entered. Now we need to add some pictures for the first menu item. Click on “Add Slideshow”, then in the next screen click on ‘Get Pictures’ This will open up the usual ‘Open File’ box. Navigate to the Folder containing the Canadian slides. Rather than insert the files individually into your slideshow you can select several files using one of the following methods: • •

To insert one file click on that file and then click the OK button. To insert a group of adjacent files, click on the top file of the group, then hold down the shift key, move the cursor to the last file in the group and click the left mouse button. Click the OK button • To insert a selection of files, hold down the CTRL key and left click all of the files that you wish to include. Click the OK button When you have made your selection let go of the Shift or CTRL key, if they had been pressed, and click the OK button. All of your files will be transferred

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Your screen will now look something like this: Several points to note here. •

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The pictures are shown with one enlargement in the upper part and a film strip beneath. Clicking on the film strip will make that picture appear enlarged above. There are two alternative views – thumbnail size or only the file details. The first picture has a ‘button’ on its top left corner. This is the picture that will appear in the main menu of the slide show. To change this picture, click on the required picture and then click on the ‘Button Image’ button. The ‘Rotate picture button will rotate the picture last clicked on through 90 degrees

The order in which the pictures is not correct. To change this, click on a picture and drag it to its new location in the film strip. The ‘Button’ image is on the wrong picture and should be on ‘Lookout 2’. Click on the required picture and then click the ‘Button Image’ button to change this. When you are satisfied with the running order and the ‘Button Image’, click the button ‘Settings, which brings up a new screen: This slide show will have a fixed slide duration of 10 seconds for each slide to be viewed before automatically moving on to the next slide in the section. This can, of course, be paused in the DVD player later should additional dialogue be required. The total run time of the show is shown at the bottom left to be 1 minute. There will be no audio track with this slide show as a Narrator will describe each slide as it is presented. The ‘Advanced’ tab unfortunately in this version of the program does nothing useful. In the newer versions of this software you can set the ‘transition between each slide. i.e. ‘fade to black and fade in the new’, ‘wipe in the new’ ‘scroll in the new’ and so on.

When you are happy with this click the OK button. This takes you back to the main menu screen where you will now see that the button picture is as required. Click on the wording ‘Untitled Slideshow’ and alter this as required; ‘Canada’ in this instance

Now repeat this whole sequence by clicking on ‘Add Slideshow’ again and this time adding in the other slides of Iona. These can be altered in terms of the running order and which slide is the one to show in the main menu screen. Change the title of this menu item to be ‘Iona’. The final screen will be as shown on the next page:

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If you wish to amend and of the parts of the slide shows right-click on the appropriate menu picture and then click ‘Edit Slideshow. On the bottom left corner of the screen you will se that there remains 628MB out of the original 650MB so there’s plenty of room for more pictures. To preview the slideshow click on the ‘Preview’ button and then click on the required menu number in the bottom number pad. The slide show will then display as it will on a TV or video projector. Currently there is a bug in this program. It should stop once the last slide in menu 1 has been shown. Unfortunately it runs on in preview. Time to save the project again ! If you are satisfied with your slide show with the order of presentation, the menu button images and the length of time that each slide is showing, then it is time to burn the show onto a CD. (Another slight problem – this version of the program only burns to a CD and not a DVD) But before we hit that ‘Burn’ button, a word about what we are going to burn it onto. • •

CD-R (CD Read) is a once only burn. Once you’ve burned it you can’t un-burn it. You can add to it in certain circumstances. CD-RW (CD Read and Write) on the other hand can be treated like a floppy. You can write to this disk, add to it, delete it and re-write as often as you care to.

So, rather than burn a whole lot of expensive coasters when your first efforts don’t work out, invest in a few CD-RW disks and read/write till you wear the things out. Once you’re happy that the show displays as you wish it to be, not only on your computer but also via a DVD recorder on your TV, then that’s the time to burn a CD. Don’t forget that a DVD player will not only play DVDs it should also happily play CDs, CD-R and CD-RW

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Put your CD-RW or CD into your computer and press the ‘Burn’ button. This little screen pops up:

The program is clever enough to recognise your recorder. If the recorder shown is not the correct one then click the arrow on the ‘Device’ box and click on the correct one from the drop down list. You may of course burn more than one copy of your show should you wish to do so. Finally the screen is saying that the Write Speed will be 4X – this is because we are recording onto a CD-RW with a speed limit of 4X. Recording speeds on a CD-R may go as high as 54x but it is not recommended that the maximum speed be used, instead opt for 8x or 12x at the most. It has been found that these lower speeds give a more stable recording. Click the OK button and a progress bar with a descriptor above of the current action will be shown. Because this burn is taking place on a CD-RW which has had a previous recording placed on it this screen pops up:

Do please note that this program will completely over-write any previous content on the CD-RW and not simply add it to the end of the CD Click ‘Yes ‘and the program will complete the burn, keeping a running commentary as to the current action. Finally the program gives a reassuring message that all is well

The program defaults to burning slide shows on CD for the UK or PAL type of TV screen. If you click on the program menu at File/Preferences you can adjust the program to output in the NTCS format which is used in some countries, USA and Canada for example. This means that the slide show is not just viewable on PAL type machinery.

Again clicking on the main program menu Edit/Style allows you to alter the appearance of many of the items. These are shown and explained on the final page overleaf:

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• • • •

Style. The demonstration here has used the style ‘Berry’, but this is one of many styles available. Scroll up and down the list to see others. Select Custom Still background Clicking on the ‘Choose’ button allows you to choose any picture you wish to be the main background to replace the existing shaded blue. This could be a picture from the show, or another picture altogether. Select Custom Button Frame Click this button to change the ‘picture frame’ that surrounds each of the menu choices shown when the CD is running a slide show. Change Text By clicking on the drop down box you may change the font used in titles, buttons or both. The next box down changes the font used and the final box determines the point size of the text. Clicking on the small square box allows you to change the colour of the font.

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