Want your advice on this one. I'm shooting the portraits for and 8th grade dance and was asked about doing a slide show. The theme is Hollywood and they want to have a red carpet with photogs flashing away. Well they want to do a slide show during the dance of the pictures taken during the red carpet. What is the quickest way to get a slide show going using a lap top? What is the quickest way to get the pictures to the lap top? I use sony vegas but if there is another quicker way let me know.

Is that a photograph slide show with a dslr camera ??or a video camera with a view to dvd?? For picture portraits i put my compact flash card from my camera in a card reader then to the computor, i use adobe premier photoshop elements 7 and you can click on make slide show, this has templates also for the red carpet you need, create slide show to music if you like, unsure about vegas only for video!!! steve

Whats '8th grade'?

Whats '8th grade'?

The school year for kids who are approximately 13 yrs old.

Boinx Software - FotoMagico - Overview (http://www.boinx.com/fotomagico/overview/)

or

If you have the time (an hr or so) then try Animoto - The End of Slideshows (http://www.animoto.com) Absolutely revolutionary for doing slideshows.

Thanks for clearing that up Ken... I will be using a dslr and trying to make a slide show as quickly as possible. Don't really have an hour to edit one. I can do one fairly quick in vegas. How about connecting the camera to the lap top? that way it would eliminate the transferring process? Has anyone done that? I'm shooting with a 7d and 40d

Take your flash card out of the camera, put it in the card reader, put it in the usb port on laptop, download your pics through adobe photshop elements 7/8 or 9,downloader, click create slide show, done.......roughly 15 minutes i would say!! steve

The school year for kids who are approximately 13 yrs old.

Thanks for clearing that up, I'm assuming this is an end of school year dance, with everyone 13 years old by the end of it.

In the UK within State Education this would either be a Year 8 Dance, or more correctly end of Key Stage 3 Dance, but would be unusual as the students wouldn't be leaving school, because after the Summer they would start Year 9 and Key Stage 4, which ends at the end of Year 11, with GCSE Examinations and a School Prom.

After the Summer, they would start College for 'A' Levels over two years, and then leave to go to University at the age of 18 to start a Degree.

However, in UK Public Schools, Prep School ends at 13 years old, followed by five years at a Public School. So this '8th Grade' dance might be more applicable to that event, I take it the 8th Grade leaves school, and starts a 9th Grade somewhere else?

I may actually be able to make sense out of the school terminology used in movies from the US after this!

If you don't need to have fancy transitions, overlays, and composites you could do a couple of things. If working in Vegas, Pull all the photos onto the timeline by dragging them and dropping them and each picture will show for the default time you have set up. You could then burn this to a dvd but be aware that it rendering pictures to mpg2 format takes some time because they will be quite a bit larger in frame size and will need to be scaled down. There are a lot of sharp edges in still photographs which also increases the render times.

Depending on your end goal, if my main goal was to get a slide show of the pictures running as quickly as possible, I'd shoot in jpeg (I usually shoot stills in raw but for quick processing I do shoot jpeg) and make sure you have a separate dedicated folder on your card that you are storing the files in. Then I'd take the card out of the camera and pop it into my laptop and connect my laptop to a projector. Fire up Picasa and use the slideshow function. You won't capture the slideshow that is presented but it would allow you to get the slideshow up and running almost instantaneously. I've done this before at corporate events and it works great.

I just checked and you can create a movie from your slides. Did the one I attached here in about 2 minutes including render time.

-Garrett

There are many programs that will run slideshows based on a specified folder of pictures (Windows? Picasa?).

Hook up your computer to the projector, click PLAY, sit back and relax.

Good luck.