Digital Media Convert

Most image viewer softwares already have the capability to create temporary slideshow for your images but it can only playable on your PC. If you want to be able to show your image slideshow on the other common devices such as VCD or DVD player, you will need to create a video file supported by those kind of device.

You must have known that most VCD player can play JPEG images but this time I am not going to discuss it because I am going to show you another alternative. I will show you how to convert your images into video playable by DVD player, so basically, this is a simple DVD authoring guide using images as the raw source.

I have tried Windows Movie Maker. In the world of freeware, it is the easiest to use but it can’t produce an acceptable quality of video since doesn’t preserve the actual resolution of each image included in the slideshow so I decided not to use Windows Movie Maker for this purpose.

I use two totally free softwares to create this image sildeshow video. The first one is PhotoFilmStrip, this is to create the slideshow video and the second one is DVDStyler to create the DVD compilation and also to include the audio track since PhotoFilmStrip is not capable of doing it.

Run PhotoFilmStrip. From [Tools] menu, choose [Import Pictures], select the pictures you want then click [open]. Select one of the images and you will see it displayed on two picturebox. On each of them you will see a white rectangle. Use the rectangle on the left side box to mark the start of the image movement and the one on right side box to mark the end of the movement. Do it for every image you have. The rectangle positions on the picture below will produce a zoom-out image movement starts from the center.

To render the movie, go to [Tools] menu then select [Render filmstrip] or just hit [F9]. On the next window select [DVD] from profile then click the [Start] button. The rendering process will produce an M2V video file located on the output directory.

Run DVDStyler, click the [File browser] tab, find the M2V video you just created with PhotoFilmStrip then drag it into the DVD window (the black one on the right). A title labelled “Title 1″ will be created. Add audio into it since you can add more title if the current Title doesn’t have an audio. Go to [File browser] again then find an audio file (Mp3 or anything) then drop it into the “Title 1″ box on the bottom. Do the same process if you want to add another title into your DVD compilation. To burn it go to [File] menu then select [Burn DVD].