Slideshow Presentation

[ChrisH]

Having recently updated to Lightroom 5 I have been impressed with the slideshow production facility. I have just completed a slideshow of my son's recent wedding, which when played in Lightroom is very sharp and looks very professional. However having saved it to video as suggested I have played it in Quicktime (the default video player for Mac) and to my horror the once sharp images in Lightroom have become disappointedly blurred.

Anyone have any suggestions or recommendations of another video program?

Regards

Chris

[revi]

You don't say how you saved it as video, but my guess is that the images had to be resized a lot (down to 720 pixels wide in the worst case),
and are stored with a lossy compression method, geared for that screen size.
If you then display that video at full screen, you get indeed a horrible quality.

So you could as a first try save the video in a HD format (the closest possible to the final screen size on which is has to be displayed)

[dje]

Chris I don't have LR but some quick research shows that you have four options for exporting as video. These range from 480x270 through to 1080p. Which one did you use ? 1080p will give the best results (which is in line with Remco's advice).

The other question is - "what do you want to do with the video?". This will also have a bearing on how you save it. But bear in mind, anything less than 1080p is likely to disappoint with quality, particularly when viewed on a large screen.

Dave

PS A lot of people swear by Proshow for this sort of thing and it probably has a lot more options than LR. You will still have this resolution limitation though.

[NorthernFocus]

My experience echoes what has already been said here. I'd export the images with sharpening to the same size as the final video format that you want. Then produce the slideshow/video with the downsized, sharpened images.

[Geoff F]

Yes, resize the images before creating the slideshow and set to the screen size and resolution; or the software recommendation for a specific output if that is different. Then do a slight sharpen if required, as you would for internet use.

After trying several trial programmes I purchased Proshow Gold and have found it to be excellent; fairly logical to use as well. There is a much more expensive version but you probably won't need that.

I have just produced an hour long video for the local history society using Proshow Gold. Using photos, music and narration/audio clips. Looks good.

[BrianA61]

Chris, I use Proshow Producer to do slideshows and really like it. I had limited processing on these before exporting them with the Proshow plugin in LR5 since they were already in jpeg format. There is a little bit of loss in clarity, but, I think you will get that no matter what due to the motion of each photo in the slideshow. I will have to experiment with output sharpening on my next project. Here is one of my slideshows as an example:

http://vid295.photobucket.com/albums...ps03e9bb75.mp4

Recorded on a standard DVD only gives "decent' results. If you want to capture the sharpness and record on DVD, I think you would have to record on a Blu-Ray.

[dje]

Recorded on a standard DVD only gives "decent' results. If you want to capture the sharpness and record on DVD, I think you would have to record on a Blu-Ray.

+1 to that Brian.

I usually produce both DVD and Bluray disks and the full HD (1080p) you can put on Bluray gives superior quality. The only problem is that not everbody has a Bluray player.

Dave

[ChrisH]

Thanks Guys - my original was saved to the lowest setting 480 x 270. i saved it to the highest setting 1080p and it worked perfectly.

I used to use ProShow Gold which was very good, however I recently changed over to Mac, which does not support Gold, only ProShow Web, which I found not as good.

Thanks for your help.

[IzzieK]

As with Brian, I use ProShow Producer. It is an excellent video program. Though I must admit that Sony Vegas is a good one too though a bit more pricey. I used Sony Vegas to put together the frames of the video I just uploaded here recently.