After a few years hiatus.... Slideshow 2014
Well, this year, I got back into making the annual slideshow. We simply had too many amazing travels and great photos to share that I simply had to spend the time to make it this year.
As a background, in October, I started with roughly 55,000 images captured over the course of 2014. Also, I make a playlist of candidate songs over the course of the year as well that I like. You can listen to all the candidates here: http://spoti.fi/1CgPI3g. This candidate list becomes my pandora seeds for 2015 as well (this is how I discover new music each year, by creating a new station with the seeds of the previous year). (My 2015 pandora station is here.)
From 55,000 images, it takes roughly 48 hours or so of simply viewing images quickly and marking candidates that look good. From there I end up with about 1200 pictures I really liked over the course of a year. At that point, I have to start looking for pictures that are too similar or finding pictures that tell the story of a certain trip. So I knocked the list down to around 200 or so.
At around 200 pictures, this is when I start looking at image quality. I'll correct for exposure issues, re-stitch any images which had stiching overlap problems, crop appropriately, etc. This process takes about 16 hours or so for the 200.
Next, I need to find a way to cut the list down to about 170 (this is the typical target count I have every year). So I simply went through and found 30 pictures that didn't NEED to be a part of the slideshow.
Once, I have these, I went back and found specific videos I ALSO wanted in the slideshow. There are not that many of these. I had to convert them all to mp4 using handbrake. This is because Sony Movie Studio will not recognize videos from the iphone. :(
Once I have all of the media ready, then selecting the music, placing all the images, setting the transition points, editing the effects takes another 16 hours or so to edit the 12 or so minutes of video.
Once everything was edited and ready to go, actually rendering the video out to a 16Mbps 1080p source takes about 90 minutes of pure rendering. This year, it took an entire day repeating this 5 times because I was having problems with Sony's rendering formats. The audio would come out awful and I would have to try another setting and re-render again (another 90 minutes for each attempt). Finally, I had to simply render as MPEG2 and convert the output to MP4 using handbrake.
Thus, there is almost 90 hours of work that goes into each of the slideshows on http://jpmovies.org. But, I always want to make sure the result is EXACTLY what I want to remember for that year.
Without further delay: (For those with high-speed internet, make sure to visit jpmovies.org for the HD 1080p version. It looks much better there.)
(Note: Depending on your internet connection speed, it make take some time after hitting play for the file to download.)
