Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Preshow Powerpoint and Images

This is topic Preshow Powerpoint and Images in forum Film Handlers' Forum at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.

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Posted by Cody Martin (Member # 2523) on 08-10-2005, 03:53 PM:

Hello,

I was wondering if anyone could post there preshow powerpoints and images. I have been asked to make one, but honestly I have no idea on where to start. Please help me.

Thanks,
cody

Posted by Randy Stankey (Member # 64) on 08-11-2005, 03:34 PM:

We show slides for

Upcoming movies:

Upcoming stage shows:

Trivia:

And a bunch of other stuff.

Generally, I don't like ads but this is tolerable because everything is produced in-house by students at the college. We hijack a few graphic arts majors through the Work Study program and put them to work for us. [evil]

Further, all of our ads are for purely internal purposes... To advertise on-campus events. NOTHING from outside sources.

My first advice is to ditch PowerPoint. Do it with QuickTime. It will produce a much cleaner presentation that won't bomb on you and leave you with a BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH when you have an auditorium full of people.

Just bite the bullet and pay that $30 for QuickTime Pro.
Make all of your images into 640 X 480 JPEGS.
Get some background music you like.
Import the pictures as an image sequence (Under the file menu.)
Cut & Paste the resulting slide show into your music track via "ADD SCALED" instead of simple "PASTE". (Under the edit menu.)
Save the show as "MyShow.mov"
Play the file on your computer. Set QuickTime to "Loop" the presentation.
Press CMD-F (or CTL-F) to put the show into Full-screen mode. (Only available if you have QuickTime Pro.)
Your show will run, unattended and virtually worry-free until it's time to start the movie. At which time you simply shut the projector off and start the show. Let the comptuer run. Once you are satisfied the movie is going the way you want it to you can go to the computer and shut it off. Don't switch it off right away because you may need to switch back to it if you have a "false start" in your movie program. My Work Study students RARELY have problems starting movies but I still like to C.Y.A. and have that slide show ready if need be. (You could even make a slide that says, "Technical trouble: Please Stand by...")

That's how WE do our slides.

Posted by Dieter Depypere (Member # 3184) on 08-11-2005, 03:43 PM:

Our slides show interesting reginal points (such as surfing schools, hotels, restaurant). Unfortunately I cannot post any images. Those slides are projected with the slide projector attached to the lamphouse of projector #1. Sound comes from a music cassette which includes the spoken captions.

Also there are slides like "Coming soon" before showing trailers or PAUSE for - guess what - pauses [Smile]

Posted by Cody Martin (Member # 2523) on 08-12-2005, 08:13 AM:

Thanks for your replies. Here is how I'm currently doing it. I'm using photoshop CS2 to create 720x480 slides. I'm using widescreen ad the screen is wide and i'm hoping this will be ok. If not I'll go to a smaller size and black out the top and bottom. After I save these a high quality jpg, I am going to take them into after effects and compile them as a video of the same size.

Any more ideas?

Thanks,

Cody

Posted by Peter Castle (Member # 1997) on 08-12-2005, 08:18 AM:

We use a home-grown Macintosh program that plays quicktime movies and jpeg slides. The former allows for animated logos (made in LightWave as anamorphic 800 x 600). The slides are produced as 1067 x 600 then scaled 70% in the horizontal, so that our video projector presents these 800 x 800 images through an anamorphic lens.
But we're looking at moving to a Panamedia pre-show presentation system.

Posted by Randy Stankey (Member # 64) on 08-12-2005, 10:27 AM:

Photoshop, GIMP, iDraw... whichever program you use, make the slides the same size and resolution as your screen. (1024*768, 640*480, 720*480 or whatever.)

Convert them into a slide show with QuikTime. Then, all you have to do is double click. Little or no fooling around required.

If you want to get REALLY funky, learn how to write SMIL code. Make a SMIL file that commands QuickTime to string several movies all together and play them as one. That way you can have slides, video and music play together in a continuous program that you can rearrange at will. Every week when your content changes you can rewrite the program in a few minutes. All you have to do is edit a little text file.

Posted by John Hawkinson (Member # 1135) on 08-12-2005, 01:36 PM:

Why would you use JPEG? For text and straight lines, JPEG compression tends to produce unpleasant artifacts. They are much-less noticable at higher resolutions, but are still there. Why not use another format?

--jhawk

Posted by Randy Stankey (Member # 64) on 08-12-2005, 05:53 PM:

quote: John Hawkinson

JPEG compression tends to produce unpleasant artifacts.

With this I agree but most of the material we get to start with is in JPEG. And, on occasion we send things to other people who seem to be able to grasp the concept of JPEG a lot quicker than they do other formats.

What saves us is two things:

1) What you said, John. Pictures at high enough resolution don't show artifacts as much.

2) Blowing the picutre up to a 12 foot high image using a regular old Eiki LCD projector. Any image that's at a higher resolution than the projector can put out is just a waste. You're just not going to get a super high quality image out of one of those.