Making a slideshow for wedding - Help

[brwrsfan]

Hey-

 

In an effort to save a little bit of money for my upcoming wedding, I've agreed to put together a slideshow for my wedding. I'm sure you've all seen them before - music (usually 3 different songs) played to pictures of the bride, then the groom, then us together. I have all of the pictures, or many of them at least, in electronic format (.jpg's) on my computer and I'm fairly techincally inclined so I'm not overly concerned about that but I have a few questions, both for people that have had this at their wedding and a technical question or two. Any help would be much appreciated.

 

#1 - What progam should I use for this?

 

I'm thinking of using Microsoft Powerpoint but it just seems that Powerpoint would get a bit tedious. Any other thoughts? Is there a basic movie application that is either free or cheap that I could use?

 

#2 - What is an appropriate number of pictures to use, and how long should each be on the screen?

 

My initial thought is based upon 3 different 4-5 minute songs. This puts each picture category at about 45-50 pictures, each being on the screen for roughly 5 seconds. Is this too many pictures? Should each picture be up longer? I don't want people to get bored, so I figured 15 mintues was about as long as I wanted to push it.

 

#3 - Is it appropriate to use any song we want?

 

The fiance and I are having an argument on this. I think that we should both be able to pick any song we want for our portion of the pictures (obviously not vulgar or anything like that). I think we should get to use a song that either we really like, relate to or have found motivational (I'm not going to pick it, but a song like Thriller by Michael Jackson would be a good example of one that I really like), is that appropriate?

[MHgb]

My opinion:

 

If you're going to play this and force people to watch it, 15 minutes is an awful long time to make people do something when they might rather be talking or at the bar. I think it's a good idea to song changes in unison with theme changes, but I would recommend shortening the songs. 5 seconds/picture is a pretty good length. I wouldn't go longer. You shouldn't need 45-50 pictures to tell a story. I think you can do it in half of that for a total of 75 pictures. Maybe 6-8 minutes total.

 

Here's an additional idea. If you play it once during the meal or whenever, you can play it with sound. Later on, you can loop it without sound the rest of the night. Gives people something more to look at and they can see themselves in the pictures and converse about it. edit: I used Avid Liquid last year for my wedding slideshow. It gives some great pan and zoom controls and transitions. However, I'm sure these days you can use PowerPoint to do similar effects. Use whatever you're most comfortable with. You won't want to spend a lot of time learning something when you still have to plan a wedding. I think you should use songs that describe you. I would refrain from explicit lyrics. John Mellencamp - Small Town, for instance might be a good one.

[DSFastball55]

If you have access to a Mac, use iMovie/iDVD. It's by far the easiest to use and makes nice presentations. Windows Movie Maker (included with XP and Vista) is pretty decent too, just not quite as easy to use as iMovie. I've used both, and both will do a good job. I've heard that Pinnacle software for PC is very good but never used it myself, but you'd have to buy that one.

[brwrsfan]

I don't have access to a Mac unfortunately but I'm pretty sure I do have Movie Maker.

 

As far as the 15 minutes go, that's just a rough estimation of each song being 5 minutes long. Obviously I wouldn't pick anything longer than that and more likely, the song will be 3-4 minutes long, shrinking the number of pictures by quite a bit.

[CecilBrown]

I've made a couple in the past year. I used Microsoft Photo Story. It's free software that you can get from Microsoft.com. It's very easy to use and gives enough options if you play with transitions. I think both of the shows were a little over 100 photos and about 10 minutes. I think they were slightly long but the Bride and Groom were happy with them. I cut the music out from MP3's and used about 45-90 second clips that would go with the appropriate pictures. I think the changing music helped keep people's attention.

[erockdahizzo]

One quick thing regarding the sound during the show at the reception. Work with the DJ to hook directly up to his receiver from your laptop. Most people just put the microphone right up to the laptop speakers and it sounds horrible.

 

Our video was about 12 minutes long and seemed to work out fine...we played it during dinner.