Make me look good!

[Steve Roberts]

Thanks for numbering your questions. Makes it easier 🙂

1. Assuming your video frame size is 720×480, let’s use a square pixel size for the sake of argument and call it 720×540. Think about how big your pictures will be onscreen. If no bigger than full frame, scan your photos so they are about 720 pixels wide or a little bigger. If you expect your photos to come at the viewer and be about twice as big as that, then you want to scan them so they are about 1440 pixels wide. To get that figure, multiply the width of the phot in inches by the dpi at which you will scan the image. Example: 10 inch wide photo at 72 dpi = 720 pixels (dots) wide. Seemple. 5 inch wide photo at 150 dpi = 750 pixels wide. The smaller the photo, the higher the dpi to get the same image size onscreen. Don’t pick a really high dpi if you don’t have to — you’ll get a really big file that will slow down your computer. That should get you started.

2. The audio has to be recorded through your audio or video editing app or utility that comes with your computer. AE can only import digital files, not live or analog audio. Once you have the diigal audio file, convert it to WAV or AIFF if it was recorded as MP3. AE doesn’t like MP3. Once it’s converted, use file>import in AE.

3. Wow. Uh … for general AE, get the Creating Motion Graphics books by Chris and Trish Meyer.

4. Not sure what you mean. Got a screen capture?

Steve

[Michael Benton]

Thanks Steve. Thats a lot of info to get me started. I’ve seen the book Creating Motion Graphics, it looked pretty interesting. I’ll have to get it then.
As for the last question about “glowing edges”. I’ll start the video and show you what I mean if it happens.
Thanks again.

[Larry Melton]

If you’re editing on Avid, there’s a plug-in called StageTools Moving Picture that will allow you to make the kind of moves you want, using files larger than 720 x 486, much as you would in AE. Don’t know much more about it, but you can buy it at Toolfarm for about $250.

Congrats on the upcoming nuptials. I’ll be celebrating 25 years of wedded bliss next month and wish I had some video of our wedding!

Dean

[Clint Fleckenstein]

Congratulations! I’m getting married in 3 weeks. But I stayed as far away from a video presentation as I could 🙂 I did the invitations and the other print work myself, but no video.

One way to save money is to just pay a videographer to do a 2 or 3 camera shoot of the ceremony, then record PA audio independently, and edit your own video. That’s what we’re doing, and the videographer is a friend/coworker from the TV station anyway. That allowed us a bigger budget for photos.

If you want to do 3D moves and a lot of photos, I’d recommend keeping it simple so you don’t run out of time. There are enough other (more important) details to worry about in the next couple of months! 🙂

Clint

[Kevin Reiner]

The glowing could be a couple things. A misplaced light, too high res of an image and you’re getting banding or flicker, or perhaps the light transmission is turned up under the images materials tab. I would have to see an example to tell.

By biggest tip for your project would be to use the sequence layers option. Especially helpful if you’re going to be doing the same move to each photo. Make the photos larger than needed so that you can zoom in on them.
Simple Example:
1. Stack all your photos into the timeline in the order that you want them to appear. 1st one on the bottom and then sequentially going up, and set them all to be 4 secs. Your last photo should be on top and all of the layers should be starting at frame zero.
2. Select that top photo and hit the “S” key.
3. Create a keyframe on the first frame and make it 100% and another one at the end at 105%. Should make a zoom in effect.
4. If you like what you see – copy those 2 keyframes and paste them into all of the other photos.
5. Select all of the layers by clicking on the 1st photo (bottom) and then Shift+click the last photo (top one).
( This is more important than it sounds, because if you do the opposite, the photos will play backwards.)
6. With all of the layers still selected, click the Animation menu up on top.
7. In the Keyframe Assistant under the animation menu, click on sequence layers
8. Select overlap, make the duration 20 frames, and make the transition be dissolve front layer.
9. Hit okay and voila! You have a slide show.
10. Have fun and try tweaking the speed of the scale growth, throw in some rotation keyframes, and adjust the anchor point to emphazise the focus point of each shot.

Another tip is to add a very slight verticle motion blur in Photoshop to avoid flicker.

Thats all I got for now. Good luck!