advice & suggestions

[stonepatterson]

I hate to sit on my hands (or let my equipment do nothing), while I am waiting to dive into production for (a DVD series) BOSS Readers late in 2012. So, with NO time constraints...

My father-in-law passed away ten years ago. My wife discovered a huge box of old photographs buried away and long forgotten while she was making her 88 year old mother's condo more live able (in Florida) a short while ago (my son and I were hiking Arches & Zion). There are about 3000 photographs (and even more sealed negatives), most in mint condition from the 1920's on. Photos are of the U.S.A. through WWII. My father-in-law loved to take photographs of everything, (EVERYTHING), was a fighter pilot in both theaters during WWII, specialized in ariel espionage and reconnaissance, (was even shot down and survived everything thrown at him in enemy territory)... pretty amazing person -- but was limited on talking about many things he experienced during WWII. He used to say, "Can't talk about it. Classified." So many of these images might have stories we will never hear.

I have yet to see the photographs, (do not want to ship them, I will drive the 1600 miles and pick them up). I thought it might be very cool to digitize (have a real good pro scanner), photoshop clean, re-compose when needed and convert to HD format (on my Mac Pro) -- place on CD, drop into my 6000, edit and put on BluRay (paced with some original royalty owned music) the best photos from the box. Might take a while, might not...

So. Advice and suggestions? As of yet, I do not have a HD camcorder, plus really want to keep this project JUST about the photographs, but also want to avoid boredom by the viewer.

So. What would you do, creatively to enhance such a project? I have a pretty go library of software on the 6000 and very adept with photoshop on my Mac Pro... I am NOT a know it all. I have never done something like this prior (exclusively photo content). Yeah, the viewership IS aimed at my wife's family... however, there may be something (I am told there is) that would fascinate many that are into visual 'history'.

Thank you very much. I will shut up now and read your advice and suggestions...

[TimKennelly]

If you are going to input it to the Mac and want the end product to be HD you are probably better off doing the transfer via USB (think USB Flash stick) digital rather than by CD. As you do not have the info to put a describing dialog track under it (ideally, first person) then a music bed and some titling for anything that clarifies any of the pictures is about it. Without dialog it doesn't really matter how good the photos are or music is, you need to severely limit the length of any one project or you will lose any audience, but the most personally dedicated to the photos.

[GrahamJones]

Hello,
It's a good idea to clean and straighten the photos in Photoshop after scanning. Also, while you're in Photoshop, you might want to crop them to the right aspect (16:9 or any multiple thereof). You can do this on the S.6000 but I find Photoshop more accurate. Also, don't forget that PhotoStudio will only accept photos that are in RGB colour mode (even if they are actually black and white), of at least 300 dpi and have the suffix 'jpg'. If you try to import a file with the suffix 'jpeg', or anything else, your Cassie won't accept it.
As ever, Mr Kennelly is right - process the scans on your Mac, then drop them onto a USB device for importing into the S.6000.
Regarding the final presentation, you might want to consider animating them - by which I mean putting on a very slight 'Ken Burns' effect. Very easily done in PhotoStudio, but if you have 3000 of them then yes, it will take a really long time!
Transitions are important - I would recommend only using the standard 1 second Crossfade - don't be tempted to use fancy wipes as they only serve as a distraction from the material.
I would also suggest that, instead of making all of the presentation on one disc, you split it into a number of discs, each of (say) 30 minutes duration - audiences can lose interest, even if they are family!
Good luck with this - it sounds like a really fascinating project.
All the best,

[CKNewman]

I'm not sure if I would crop all of those photographs. They could be presented in their original size with a 16:9 background. I think sorting and preplanning would help to create more "bite-sized" chapters.

[CasablancaExpert]

Certainly the merge between digital photography and videography has been moving together and it's fun to see (I think) how they _can_ become one.

I have done some larger projects for clients (though more in the hundreds not thousands of photos). As you likely have thought I would first go through and filter out duplicates, close shots, etc to get the quantity down to a more finite set of photos for your presentation. I also use a flatbed scanner and scan to my Mac computer - on my Epson it allows me to set two photos at once and bring both in as separate JPEG files - this can be a time-saver. I choose not to do much editing of the photos, but do a quick crop to ensure I have just the photos themselves and no spillover of the frame, etc.

I have found a few extra seconds ensuring the images are level on the scanner eliminates several minutes (times hundreds of photos) using a transform/horizon adjustment tool in post saves lots of time for me. Once the photos are in my computer I have chosen to use a cloud based service called Animoto. Many of our Casablanca colleagues use either ProShow Gold or ProShow Producer - which is a Windows PC based system for photo/video montages. That company - ProDex - also now has a cloud based product that is quite good.

As Craig suggested - I split the photos into segments or chapters - you can see some samples on my website here

I take the finished video, upgrade to HD quality and export the file and then import that into my Casablanca - where I add audio, additional titles, seam together the different sections of the montage....my finishing work.

I have a Casablanca Expert Public Webinar where I presented this topic - Photo Montages with Animoto. You can view that here:
http://cassieexpert.live.subhub.com/articles/20120323

Regards,
Chet