Creating an audio slideshow with Quicktime Pro and iMovie

My goal was to make a movie with still images from a series of photo booth photos that my lovely assistant Liz took at a wedding. At first I was using Final Cut Pro to create an audio slideshow and then trying to compress it afterwards using Visualhub or exporting to web in Quicktime Pro. The problem that I kept running into was that the frame rate was always off because I was I was trying to compress a 3 GB video down to, well in my case it was 1024mb which is still way to big for the web, but if I went any smaller the video looked like mash potatoes. So this was rather frustrating, because the quality of the photos were not holding to the expectation I would of liked.

So after struggling for a couple of weeks I started to research other techniques on how I could accomplish an audio slideshow. I came across Channing Johnson’s blog and found a video of exactly what I was trying to accomplish. So I gave him a call and was able to help me out and here is the process I used to successfully make a fast paced slideshow.

1. First I created an action in photoshop to resize all my photos to 72 dpi resolution (Make sure that the “Constrain Proportions” box is checked) and change the color profile to Apple RGB
2. Place all the images you wish to use in your slideshow in a single folder. Label the images with a common name followed by sequential numbers in the order you wish them to appear in your slideshow
3. Open QuickTime Pro and choose Open Image Sequence from the File menu. (you must have Quicktime Pro in order to use the Image Sequence Option)
4. Select the amount of time for each image to appear by choosing a frame rate. I choose 6 frames per a second
5. Save the movie
6. Open iMovie and import your .mov file
7. Add text and audio if desired
8. Export Quicktime Movie (not Quicktime conversion). This time I ended up with a 86MB movie instead of a 3GB, still too big for web, so……
9. Locate file
10. Open in Quicktime
11. Export for Web, this gave me a 8.7MB file which is much better for web playback

Click here to check out the end product