Best way to publish a narrated slide show?

Folks:

I have about 200 images from Burning Man that I’d like to present with audio narration. I want the slides to be shown at maximum quality (i.e., I’m not sure if an MPEG video from YouTube is the best idea). I want to record the audio and the timing/sequence myself. Right now the slides are already a Google Plus album (friends who are programmers at Google: Why isn’t this a standard feature? “Add narration to an album”? Microsoft PowerPoint lets you do it, so it can’t be impossible to code.).

What’s the most practical way to do this? If worst comes to worst I guess I wouldn’t mind publishing it as a 1080p video on youtube.com but even then I have to author it somehow. I do have Adobe Premiere but I feel that there should be an easier way to author. I think that if I make every photo a PowerPoint slide I can have PPT export a WMV file.

Thanks in advance for any help.

11 thoughts on “Best way to publish a narrated slide show?

  1. J: Thanks for the tip. Adobe Voice is pretty awesome. It is hard to do a slide show, though, because when you say that you want to add pictures from Dropbox it loses the order (so you have to reassemble slides that had been ordered by filename).

  2. Why not just change the file names to reflect the correct order? Start with a number but increment by 10 so you can change you mind later without having to rename all of them.

  3. Tom: Thanks to Google Picasa, the file names already reflect the slide show order (each filename is prefixed with a three-digit number). Adobe Voice ignores that order when showing available images from a Dropbox folder.

    [Update: Actually I was mistaken about this. That is my normal way to export slide shows from Picasa but I hadn’t used it this time. For some reason both Windows and Dropbox preserve the slide show order anyway. I renamed all of the files to have names such as “burning-man (4)” and it didn’t affect the way that Voice presents them. I also discovered that Voice won’t show the complete Dropbox folder name. So if you have similarly named Dropbox folders there is no way to tell them apart in Voice.]

  4. I would probably just record myself talking about the images as I flipped through them on the computer. Then, drop that audio track into a 4k Premiere Pro sequence. Then, drag the images into the sequence and adjust the time of each to match your narration.

    It’s not as easy as it should be, no, but the outcome will be in 4k.

  5. COD: Thanks for the recommendation of Microsoft Movie Maker. http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-vista/demo-create-a-slide-show-with-music-in-windows-movie-maker indicates that it should be doable with this free application. Though I already own Adobe Premiere and I don’t think MSFT makes it any easier than Adobe. All of this seems overly heavyweight. I would think that there would be a standard way with JavaScript to have a Web browser play an audio file that was annotated with “move to next slide” and then fetch the images directly from a server. My fear is that pushing this all into an MPEG is going to increase the amount of data by 20X for no benefit to the user. I guess this is what keeps Cisco stock booming!

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