Boy, I've spent the past few days putting together a slideshow with musical accompaniment to submit to an upcoming Slideluck (Potshow) event and it has been a rather pain in the ass.
I use a Mac, so tried to use iMovie though I despise its strange interface and inability to set slide durations without it adjusting them internally to somehow account for transitions into and out of the slide. Anyway, I got it done, then exported to Quicktime with H.264 compression per the Slideluck requirements, but the resulting QT movie was overbright and desaturated. Googling this, it appears to be a common problem with slideshows exported with this codec. No one had a solution other than to plead with Apple to fix it. To no avail, apparently. I tried to compensate by darkening and oversaturating the pics before export, and it sorta worked but it exposed the degradation of image quality that iMovies is infamous for.
So, I read these great reviews of FotoMagico for Mac-based slideshow making. Spent $100 on it and its user interface is wonderfully straightforward and simple (like the original iMovie), and it does not degrade image quality. It still had the same H.264 overexposed / desaturation problem, but with some trial and error adjusting, got it right. Then I uploaded to vimeo, which apparently darkens things a bit in its processing, so I had to go back and dial back the darkening a bit. Finally got it right.
Still need to adjust a couple transitions -- amazing what a few hundredths of a second can do in terms of making a transition either "eh" or "ahhhhh." Anyway, anyone have experience with showing slideshows at Slideluck events?
I'll take care of you on Vimeo
