Subscribe Feed (RSS)No More Gutters in Your Slideshows
September 15th, 2008 by Rob Strobbe | Filed under Tutorials.There is one problem that people often run into when turning a collection of photos into a slideshow: Not all of them are quite the right aspect ratio. In particular, when portrait (taller than they are wide) photos are placed into a landscape video (wider than it is tall, and the standard for just about any video), you end up with black gutters on two sides. And that’s just kind of tacky.
(Vocabulary bonus: When the gutters are on the top and bottom, the image is “letterboxed.” When the gutters are on the left and right, the image is “pillorboxed.”)
But what are your options? Crop the photos so that they fill the screen entirely? But then you may end up losing important parts of those photos. Add in a colored background or matte of some kind? Maybe, but how do you find something that looks good with all of the photos in your slideshow?
Well, here’s a quick and easy method for making an attractive slideshow in Sony Vegas Pro or Sony Vegas Movie Studio without those empty gutters. The secret is to create a background from the photos you’re already using in your slideshow.
- Before you begin, make a couple changes to your Vegas settings. Go to Options > Preferences > Editing tab and make sure that “Automatically overlap multiple selected media when added” is checked. For the “Cut-to-overlap conversion Amount” (next setting under the check box), enter the amount of time you want the crossfade between photos to last. Click OK.
- Select your images in Vegas’ Explorer or in Windows Explorer and drag them onto the Vegas timeline. Vegas will add them all at once and set up a crossfade between them according to the settings you used above.
- Right-click the track that has the photos and choose Duplicate Track.
- Click the Track Motion icon (on the track header, looks like two rectangles with an arrow) for the upper copy and resize the track so that there a good sized “border” around all of your photos. It will help to find the “largest” picture in the slideshow and use that as a guide.
- Click the Track Motion icon for the lower track and resize this one so that it is larger than the viewing area. Essentially, you’re zooming in on this track so that it acts as a bit of an abstract background, but one with a similar look to our main slideshow. I also like to move this background track a bit off center.
- Close out the Track Motion dialog and try adding some Video FX to this lower track (drop them onto the track header so the effects are applied to all of the pictures at once). This will take some experimenting to get the look that works best for your slideshow, but a good standby is the combination of the Black and White FX using a setting of between 25% and 50%, and the Gaussian Blur FX. You want to make the background different from the foreground, but you don’t (I assume) want it to overpower the foreground.
And that’s all there is to it. A slideshow that uses photos of different aspect ratios, but doesn’t look tacky or take a lot of time. If your photos blend into their backgrounds too much, you might want to add a subtle (or not so subtle) border to the photos. This can quickly be done using the same methodology as above. Duplicate the top track again and use track motion to either shrink the (new) top track slightly or enlarge the the middle (formerly top) track slightly. Just enough so that there you can see a bit of an edge around your photo. Then add the FX of your choosing to the middle track in order to alter its color or appearance. I used the Brightness and Contrast FX to give this new “border” a bit of a shine.
Here’s an example of a slideshow created using this technique:
Tags: effects, pan/crop, track motion
This is a big help really. Thanks a lot.
I’m glad you found it useful, boodoi. And thanks for the feedback!
Yeah, that’s well done. I’m gonna download this little movie clip of yours and make a text file of your instructions. I use Vegas to make ’slideshow movies’ for small businesses…using their own digital photos. I’m always on the lookout for good slideshow techniques. There’s a excellent little program I use called Memories On TV Pro 4 which has some slick photo & text animations…output to AVI and bring it into Vegas to do the rest. These are all good. Another new development is http://www.sliderocket.com, but without a screen cap program like Camtasia, there isn’t any way to ’save’ the movie. A very slick web app though.
Thanks for the tips! I took a quick look at SlideRocket. I used to use Powerpoint a lot, so this is an interesting alternative.
Thanks a lot,
i was looking for something like this for months!
great tips. thanks!
i just had a question…
how are you rendering this?
whenever i try and render anything, my transitions are not good. they are jittery and pixelated, no matter what format i render as.
thanks.
Depends on where I’m going with the file. For Youtube, I generally output the highest quality that makes sense for the project — usually DV AVI — and let Youtube do its own compression. Most of the time, Youtube is going to recompress to its liking anyhow. If you need to save space, try WMV with a bitrate around 1Mbps. Unless you’re outputting in HD, then you will probably want a higher bitrate.
Thanks for the tutorial. Makes pictures look good.I will try it.
What I am looking for however is a method of putting two of more portrait size photos on to the screen at the same time. For example, the first one would shift to the left side of the screen and another one would come in on the right side. Then the one on the left side would disappear and be replaced by a new slide with the one on the right side still on the screen. And so on.
Can you suggest a way of doing that?
Thanks Peter F
Hi, Peter. I would alternate the photos across two tracks (put Photo #1 on the first track, Photo #2 on the second track, Photo #3 on the first track, and so on). Use track motion or Pan / Crop to position the photos appropriately since a portrait image is going to appear dead center by default.
Then drag the top left and top right corners of each event in to create fades for each image. Finally drop a transition of your choice (the Push and Slide ones would be appropriate for what you want to do) on those fades. If you’re using Vegas Pro, you can use transition progress envelopes to extend or even freeze the transition where needed.
One thing that might help is to use Photoshop or something similar to put your portrait photos into landscape images. Just open them up, resize the canvas to a landscape size (655×480 for a standard DV project will account for the difference in pixel aspect ratio) and position the image to the left. Also keep in mind the safe zone areas — most televisions will cut off about 5-10% of your video. When you’re done, save to a format that preserves alpha channel transparency; Vegas likes PNG best.
If you need any more help, I’ll try to put together a tutorial.
This was exactly what I was looking for. Thank you so much.