« [REVIEW—EPSON V500 SCANNER] | Main | [ PANASONIC LUMIX FZ18 camera ] »
October 11, 2007
[ THE SUPER SLIDE SHOW ]
“HIGH DEFINITION” is the buzz term in televisions and computer monitors these days. And high definition is not simply an ill-defined sales pitch, like high fidelity. It has real meaning and cannot be applied to display devices that don’t meet the standards.
Just in case you have not had a chance to compare high definition displays with standard definition units here’s the difference: on a standard, low definition screen we look at the world through fly wire; on a high definition screen it is as though the world is seen through clear glass. And high definition displays are widescreen. The width to height ratio of a widescreen display is 16:9; standard displays are 4:3.
Which started us thinking about the high definition options open to lesser mortals who are not keeping up with the Joneses in the expensive plasma or LCD TV department. Can we have high definition digital images if we don’t have an HD TV? To which the answer is: probably.
Widescreen computer monitors are becoming common and they are capable of at least displaying low-high definition and some can handle high-high definition. Monitors, as with TVs, can be called high definition if they display pictures with pixel dimensions of 1280 by 720. The ABC occasionally transmits pictures in this low-high definition form. While it is not the best it is better than standard resolution.
True high definition has a picture pixel dimension of 1920 by 1080 and this is the knock-your-socks-off resolution. You can put your nose close to the screen and not be aware of pixels or lines. Our Dell 24” monitor will display true high definition pictures so we looked for a way to make HD slideshows from our camera files and we found it.
Memories on TV, which we have recommended in the past for slideshow creation, has a Pro version (USD$80) that makes stunning HD shows with selectable transitions and controllable pan and zoom effects. You also need the free Xvid video codec installed.
Once the pictures are dropped into MoTV and music is added and the transitions and effects have all been customised the next step is to export the finished show as an AVI video file. In other words we are creating a high definition movie from the still images. We got the best results by cropping the images to 1920 by 1080 in Photoshop before loading them into MoTV.
Under Edit/Preference set the Aspect Ratio to widescreen. Then, under Project, select Export to MPG/AVI file. Click on Browse and select a destination folder, set Save As to AVI and give the file a name.
Click on Advanced Settings and set Video to PAL and Resolution to Custom, and enter either 1280 by 720 or 1920 by 1080, depending on your display. When you click on Finish you choose a codec for encoding. Choose Xvid. When the Audio codec box comes up we choose Windows Uncompressed.
The video generation will start and it is processor-dependent and can take a long time. You might need to leave the PC running overnight. And the smoothness of the display might also depend on the capacity of the processor. If pan and zoom motion is jerky then remake the show with Picture Effect set to None.
Believe us, the results are sensational.
*
Posted by terry at October 11, 2007 03:35 AM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://bleedingedge.com.au/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/1372