Adding Sound Captions to Slides
 

I'm putting together a slide show for my kids to show them our recent trip to Ireland. I plan to burn it on to a DVD so that they can run it their TVs or computer. I have the software to do that plus I can add backgound music or even a commentary to the entire show. What I can't do is tie a sound caption to a specific slide so that, rather than have a running commentary that would probbly end up out of sync. with the slides, each slide would have it's own attached wav. file. Has anyone of you done something like this and if so how? Am I trying to be too ambitious with this project?:confused:
The other way for me to do this is to put a music background to the slide show and add text captions to each slide. That is easy, if slow, for me to do.

Dan,

I think you will need to record your commentary as wav files using a sound recorder application on your PC, input via a mic and your sound card. Once you have the commentary as a series of wav files, you should be able to synch them to the slides as though they were background music.

Anybody else got any ideas?

Tried that but can only link one wav. file to the whole show.

The only slideshow software that I know of that will do this is ProShow Gold.

http://www.photodex.com/products/proshowgold/

Harry

Microsoft Digital Photostory 3.1 will do what you want. After importing the slides into the storyboard, subsequent screens allow you to hit the red record button and add narration for each slide individually and to set up background music for the entire show. The time that each slide will be displayed matches the time-length of that slide's narration. (I did something similar to what you're doing for a friend's Italy vacation and I used Photostory to generate a .wma (my mistake - they're .wmv files) file with the pics in correct order, pan/zoom transitions between slides, sound, etc. I could play on the computer, but ended up using that .wma file as input to Windows MovieMaker and/or Cyberlink Power2Go to actually generate the DVD with menu selection of a couple of 'movies'. )

I was going to second "ProShow Gold".
But Ghherd's suggestion seems very interesting too. I will try that soon.
The key is to generate a DVD, VCD that is selfbootable and usable on the home DVDplayer without need for PC.
Thanks for sharing info.

I've got Cyberlink Power Producer 2 Gold but I'll have to check out the cost of the other programs.

I revisited Photo Story 3 just to refresh my memory. It's available as a free download from Microsoft, provided you have a legally licensed copy of Windows XP on your computer. Photostory will generate a .wmv file at resolutions from 640X480 up to 1024X768. It will NOT directly generate the DVD - the HELP utility says you have to import the .wmv file created by PhotoStory into another piece of software. I use Windows MovieMaker since it came bundled on my computer. The only nit I've found with PhotoStory is that the first slide shows as a black screen until you hit play. So, I import a title still photo into Windows Movie Maker, then import the .wmv video file. Movie Maker will create a DVD playable on either computer DVD drive or a DVD Player/TV combo, although I never found a way of putting more than one video/slide show on a DVD disk. If I want to put more than one video on a DVD, I use Cyberlink Power2Go (also bundled). It handles setting up selection menus of multiple videos on one disk.

I've been working with Photo story 3 since you told me about it. It's a really useful program, if rather cumbersome in some ways.
Thanks for the lead.

Glad you're finding it of some help. I'm working with it again for a project for church. I find the user interface pretty good, except when wanting to add or move a consecutive block of pictures around in an exisiting 'project.' Oh, well, I knew the job was dangerous when I took it!

Rgds, ghh

It seems that pictures must be imported and/or moved one at a time rather in a block?

Pics can be imported in blocks (e.g. I can use the Ctrl and shift keys to select many pictures for importing). However, the imported pics all end up at the end of the storyboard, and if I already have 20 images in the stream and want the new ones to go into the middle of the existing stream, the only way I've been able to do it is to highlight newly imported images one at a time, and hit the left arrow button multiple times to move that one image, then go back to select a new image, multiple left arrows, etc. Multiple selections via ctrl and shift don't work for rearranging on the storyboard screen.

Life gets easier if all the images to be imported are in one folder, and can be sorted by date/time (chronological order) or by alphabetical order. A project I'm working on now, I'm taking photos daily and trying to keep the project updated on a daily basis, but unfortunately the pictures won't be ordered strictly by ascending time.

The first time I used Photostory was for a friend's vacation slideshow, so that application lended itself to creating a new project, having a folder with all edited images arranged in ascending name order (Img0010, Img0011, Img0012_modified, Img0014, Img0020_rotated, etc), and importing them as a group in the correct order.

I finally finished the project. It runs 25.5 minutes and is complete with pictures, background music and narration. The built in effects work really well, giving almost a movie feel to the the project. I'm very pleased with the overall result but think that I could have done better with the narration. The mike seems very noisy when it switches on and off. The recording volume may have been set too high.
My wife even admitted to being impressed. Next step - bore the relatives with vacation pictures.