petego4it wrote:
I need to make a life photoshow celebrating my wife's 80th birthday smoothly set to her fave music excerpts. Best program in today's world to organize such incl. music/picture synch, queuing, integrating slide changes & doing titles? Then keep the result for possible future showing? Tips especially appreciated for 1)copying/resurrecting old photos to project? 2)Integrated projector with quality hifi sound? My experience with prior similar is that appropriate music choices and hifi presentation are really key. Sample shows for ideas?
I'd also like to gather Happy Birthday messages from remote friends/family & incorporate as part of this with pic of the friend or possibly integrate a movie clip. Best fail safe ways to do all this?
I need to make a life photoshow celebrating my wif... (
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As a multi-image producer in the 1980s, I used 15 slide projectors, computerized dissolve units and controllers, a computer, a 4-track tape deck, and a lot of other gear to make corporate presentations.
TODAY, I can do the same sort of shows with 4K video produced on a MacBook Air in Final Cut Pro, a video editing software. You can also use DaVinci Resolve or Adobe Premiere Pro, or even iMovie or Adobe Premiere Pro Elements.
I use GarageBand on the Mac to edit audio. It has more tools than my old audio studio of the 1980s, and it comes free with every Mac.
As for copying old PRINTS, I use a home-brew replica of a professional copy stand, my MILC camera with a macro lens, and a couple of NEEWER LED panel lights I also use for video. I copy the prints to raw files and edit them in Lightroom Classic. For just a few at a time, I might use a scanner. But for dozens or hundreds, I set up the copy stand and batch originals by size.
To copy Black-and-White negatives, color negatives, and color slides, I use the process outlined in my white paper (PDF file attached below).
I'm extremely particular. I edit every image, to crop, adjust or restore color and tones, sharpen, remove blemishes and dust spots, etc. This can take hundreds of hours for a professional quality show. But the magic is worth it. I use Lightroom Classic and Photoshop to do that editing.
The use of video editing software allows plenty of flexibility. You can import both video and audio clips, along with still images. You can pan and zoom still or video images, with the Ken Burns effects. You can use hundreds of special effects, although I do so sparingly. You can add titles. You can import music from any digital source. Any sorts of things you might do for a simple motion picture can be done in video editing software.
Regarding music: Virtually ALL commercially available recorded music is copyrighted material. It is licensed for private, home use ONLY, unless you make other arrangements with the producer, composer, and performers, via a clearing house of some sort. If you use it without permission, in any sort of business or promotional context, you risk hefty fines and imprisonment. So proceed with caution.
If you upload to YouTube, music will be scanned automatically and your content may be rejected if you don't have the proper clearances.
I recently did a retrospective slide show for my Davidson College 45th Year Class Reunion, Class of 1977. I copied and restored dozens of classmates' snapshots, along with my own archives. We deliberately made the show silent to avoid the issue of the college getting sued for unauthorized use of music in alumni fund-raising (class reunions are MAJOR fund raising events). The show ran on big screens before, during, and after our class dinner. If you PM me, I'll send a link to a 1080P copy of that Davidson show. It's on a private channel on YouTube that I set up for my classmates who could not be at the reunion.
Plenty of "production music" is available for nominal licenses fees, if all you need is a simple music bed behind narration or images. I have used many libraries of such material. APM OmniMusic is my "go to" source:
https://www.apmmusic.com/libraries/omnimusic-omn