Comments on: No More Gutters in Your Slideshows

By: Elaine Sutherland

Elaine Sutherland — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 10:15:10 +0000

This was exactly what I was looking for. Thank you so much.

By: Rob Strobbe

Rob Strobbe — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 15:34:26 +0000

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.

By: Peter Fuhrman

Peter Fuhrman — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 20:23:03 +0000

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

By: Rob Strobbe

Rob Strobbe — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 23:05:30 +0000

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.

By: james

james — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 13:21:42 +0000

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.

By: eidotter

eidotter — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 16:03:33 +0000

Thanks a lot,

i was looking for something like this for months!

By: Rob Strobbe

Rob Strobbe — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 18:53:04 +0000

Thanks for the tips! I took a quick look at SlideRocket. I used to use Powerpoint a lot, so this is an interesting alternative.

By: Doug McNichol

Doug McNichol — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 19:53:58 +0000

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.

By: Rob Strobbe

Rob Strobbe — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 05:50:00 +0000

I’m glad you found it useful, boodoi. And thanks for the feedback!

By: boodoi

boodoi — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 07:59:05 +0000

This is a big help really. Thanks a lot.