Hello there,
I did the same kind of thing and I am still getting requests for more copies of
the show....I put it all onto DVD together with the video of the wedding and
all the still photo's from the Official photographer. It all fits nicely onto
Dual Layer disks.
Photo Story
=========
The ONLY reason I would use PhotoStory was if it had a particular effect I
wanted...but I no longer use Photo Story...you might infer from that that I
could see no advantage. A lot of people RAVE ON ENDLESLY about how Photo Story
makes a smaller file. I guess it does...but that will not benefit you with your
endeavor as you should aim to make a DV-AVI file that will be imported into
your DVD authoring software and unless you are constrained by free hard drive
space the fact it does make a smaller file should not be a reason for using
it....it will become larger anyway when you convert to DV-AVI
Effects
=====
Before you become to "taken" by the very clever effects that Movie Maker and
the excellent add on package from
www.pixelan.com take a moment to watch the
TV... I suppose there are a number of categories that you can think of to
describe the style of any show. There would be the "Kids" stuff.....lots of
spectacular transitions, then perhaps "some" pop videos...lots of straight cuts
in rapid succession to create a visual effect some of which is quite
clever.....and doing an injustice to those I leave out you have those that are
pleasing to the eye, Gentle fades between one image and the next which occur
fast enough so that the eye does not have to go through the phase of trying to
determine what belongs to each side of the transition.
Audio
====
I have what a friend recently called a full blown library of commercial
DVD's....you will see the point in a moment Not to long back I went to the
local Cinema, because of the crowd of people leaving at the end I remained
seated and listened to the music at the end of the film. It occurred to me that
it would be good for background music on my videos, and so....I am now steadily
creating an audio library of the title music at the end of my dvd's.....some of
the DVD's have a music video as well. One of the visitors to my website has
taken video I shot years ago plus music I had, except her copy of the music was
better than mine and created a video called Forlorn....its in the visitors
video section on my website The effect she has created is better than my first
attempt and if you listen to the music properly you will find yourself agreeing
with the title of the video. The original films are the Lord Of The Rings The
video itself is not all that good because of the camera operator...ME
Video Compilation
=============
You should pause for another moment and consider how the film makers do it. I
think it would be reasonable to say that they never put the whole thing into
one project (for want of another way of saying it) and tell their compiler to
get on with it at any time other than the final build, and that's the approach
you should take too.
In your case perhaps considering each era of their lives a separate project
that when compiled/built will be added to the final project. So long as you
make no edits to the video in that final project you will loose no quality that
you could measure. So perhaps create separate videos by using 5, 10, 15yrs old
etc and bring them together at the end.
Looping
======
Movie Maker is just an editor/compiler into either DV-AVI or WMV formats. On
their own neither of these formats has the ability to loop, but when inserted
into a web page as part of an ActiveX setup they can via the ActiveX be made to
loop.
Some DVD editing software packages will give you the ability to make the video
loop. Dazzle DVD Complete has that feature and I think so does the latest
Nero...but I am not sure.....so don't quote me on that.
Most domestic DVD players have the ability to loop the video....you might see
the option referred to as "Replay" with an A and B connected by an open loop
--
Best Wishes.....John Kelly
www.the-kellys.org
www.the-kellys.co.uk
Check out free video hosting at
www.the-kellys.org
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