Section 11.4. The QuickTime Slideshow


11.4. The QuickTime Slideshow

As Chapter 9 makes clear, once you select your images and choose the music to go with them, iPhoto orchestrates the production and presents it live on your Mac's screen as a slideshow.

Which is great, as long as everyone in your social circle lives within six feet of your screen.

The day will come when you want friends and family who live a little farther away to be able to see your slideshows. Sure, you could pack up your Mac and fly across the country, but wouldn't it be easier to simply send the slideshow as a file attachment that people can play on their own computers?

That's the beauty of QuickTime, a portable multimedia container built into every Mac. Even if the recipient uses a Windows PC (every family has its black sheep), your photos will meet their public; QuickTime movies play just as well on HPs and Dells as they do on iMacs and PowerBooks.

The trick is to convert your well- composed iPhoto slideshow into a standalone QuickTime movie. You'll then have a file on your hard drive that you can email to other people, post on your Web page for downloading, burn onto a CD, and so on. When played on the computer or TV screen, your grateful audience will see your photos, large and luscious, accompanied by the music and effects you chose for them.

11.4.1. Exporting an Instant Slideshow

Before you send your "slideshow movie" to hapless relatives who will have to endure downloading it over a dial-up connection, make sure it's worth watching in the first place.

11.4.1.1. Step 1: Perfect the Slideshow

As you review your presentation, place the pictures into the proper sequence, remembering that you won't be there to verbally "set up" the slideshow and comment as it plays. Ask yourself, "If I knew nothing about this subject, would this show make sense to me?"

11.4.1.1.1. Which photos make the cut

If you're used to the slideshow feature described in Chapter 9, the method for specifying which photos are exported to your QuickTime movie might throw you.

  • If one thumbnail is selected, that's all you'll get in the finished QuickTime movie the world's shortest slideshow. (This is the part that might throw you: An iPhoto slideshow would begin with that one selected photo and then move on from there, showing you all the rest of the photos in the album.)

  • If several thumbnails are selected, only they make it into the QuickTime slideshow movie.

  • If no thumbnails are selected, the entire album's worth of photos wind up in the show.

When you're ready to convert your presentation to a QuickTime movie, choose Share Export. The Export Photos dialog box appears, as shown in Figure 11-16. Click the QuickTime tab, where you have some important decisions to make.

Figure 11-16. Here's the Export dialog box with the QuickTime tab selected. This is the airlock, the womb, the last time you'll be able to affect your movie before it's born. You're free to change these dimensions, however.
If the movie will be played back from a hard drive, you may want to crank up the dimensions close to the size of the screen itself: 800 x 600 is a safe bet if you're not sure. Remember, though, you have to leave some room for the QuickTime Player controls, so that your audience can start and stop the movie.


11.4.1.2. Step 2: Choose the Movie Dimensions

Specifying the width and height for your movie affects not only how big it is on the screen during playback, but also its file size, which may become an issue if you plan to email the movie to other people. iPhoto generally proposes 640 x 480 pixels. That's an ideal size: big enough for people to see some detail in the photo, but usually small enough to send, in compressed form, by email.

  • Proportion considerations . All of these suggestions assume, by the way, that your photos'dimensions are in a 4:3 ratio, the way they come from most cameras . That way, they'll fit nicely into the standard QuickTime playback window.

  • Size considerations . As you choose dimensions, however, bear in mind that they also determine the file size of the resulting QuickTime movie. If you plan to send the movie by email or post it on a Web page, watch out for ballooning file sizes that will slow dial-up sufferers to a crawl.

  • Managing music . In the Music section of your QuickTime export dialog box, you can turn on "Add currently selected music to movie." (If you want a different soundtrack, click Cancel, click the Play Slideshow triangle beneath the Source list, click the Music tab, choose a different song from, and click Save Settings.)

    To save file size, you could turn off this box. That 320 x 240 movie would shrink to a mere 350 Kbut you'd also wind up with a silent movie.

    Fortunately, there is a middle road; see the box below.

11.4.1.3. Step 3: Seconds per Photo

How many seconds do you want each picture to remain on the screen before the next one appears? You specify this number using the "Display image for ___ seconds" box in the QuickTime Export dialog box.

When you first open the dialog box, iPhoto proposes whatever frame rate you used in your original slideshow. You're free to change it to other timings. (Although you can type a frame rate shorter than one second, iPhoto won't actually create the show with a rate any faster than one image per second. So much for artistic license.)

POWER USERS' CLINIC
Musical Liposuction

By cutting its soundtrack's bit rate (a measure of its sound quality) from 192 to, say, 128 kbps, you can shrink the file size for a hypothetical 320 x 240pixel movie from 2.1 MB to 1.5 MB, with very little sonic difference.

Start by choosing iTunes Preferences. In the Preferences dialog box, click the Importing icon. From the Import Using pop-up menu, choose MP3 Encoder. Then, from the Setting pop-up menu, choose "Good Quality (128 kbps)." (A lower quality number will result in even smaller files.) Click OK.

Now highlight the track you want to add to your slideshow, and then choose Advanced Convert Selection to MP3. iTunes converts the song into a duplicate with the new, lower sample rate. The songs name appears in the iTunes list just below the original. (You might want to rename it to differentiate it from the original song by highlighting it and then choosing File Get Info. Click Info in the resulting dialog box.)

Now return to iPhoto. Select your new resampled song as the soundtrack.

When you export the slideshow to QuickTime, you'll find that it's much more svelte, but sounds practically identical to the puffier version.


11.4.1.4. Step 4: Background Colors

The color or image you choose in the Background section of the dialog box will appear as the first and last frames of the export. It will also fill in the margins of the frame when a vertically oriented or oddly proportioned picture appears. Generally speaking, white, light gray, or black makes the best background.

If you click the Image button and then the Set button next to it, you can navigate your hard drive in search of a graphics file to use as the slideshow background.

11.4.1.5. Step 5: Export the Movie

Having specified the dimensions, frame rate, music, and background for your movie, there's nothing left but to click the Export button in the dialog box. You'll be asked to specify a name and folder location for the movie (leaving the proposed suffix .mov at the end of the name), and then click Save. After a moment of computing, iPhoto returns to its main screen.

Press -H to hide iPhoto; then navigate to the folder you specified and double-click the movie to play it in QuickTime Player, the movie-playing program that comes with every Mac. When the movie opens, click the Play triangle or press the Space bar to enjoy your newly packaged slideshow (Figure 11-17).

Whenever playback is stopped , you can even "walk" through the slides manually by pressing the right-arrow key twice (for the next photo) or the left-arrow key once (for the previous one).

Figure 11-17. Once you're in QuickTime Player, you can control the playback of the slideshow in a number of ways. If you don't feel like clicking and dragging onscreen controls, the arrow keys adjust the volume (up and down) or step through the photos one at a time (right and left).



Tip: Even Windows PC users can enjoy your QuickTime moviesif they visit www.apple.com/quicktime/download to download the free QuickTime Player program for Windows.

11.4.2. Exporting a Saved Slideshow

But what if you've created a more elaborate slideshow, using the new iPhoto 5 Slideshow editing mode? What if there's a Slideshow icon in your Source list at this moment, representing hours you've spent perfecting your pans, fiddling with your fades, and tweaking your timings into a work of art? This creation isn't for posting on the Web. It's designed to be savored in all its glory on a 30-inch Cinema Display. And you want to preserve every nuance when you export your masterpiece to QuickTime.

To do so, click the slideshow icon in the Source list and, once again, choose Share Export. This time, though, the Export dialog box (Figure 11-16) asks you to make only three decisions: what you're going to name the file, where you're going to save it on your hard drive, and what its dimensions are. Make your selections, click the Export button, then go walk the dog. iPhoto will take some time to convert your Saved slideshow to a QuickTime movie.




iLife 05. The Missing Manual
iLife 05: The Missing Manual
ISBN: 0596100361
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 314
Authors: David Pogue

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