Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Slide Show Rant

Sorry I haven't been around lately. It was the October birthday celebration time again, and it was held at my house again. And, as usual, I got the bright idea to make a slide show for all three of the birthday celebrants.

I asked friends and family members to give me a description of the celebrant. So many times we say nice things about someone at their eulogy, but they never find out what you like about them while they are alive. I thought this would give a chance for the celebrant to find out what people think about them, and have something that makes them feel good about themselves that they can watch later when they are feeling down. Making the slides of the descriptions was fun and easy. I managed to keep them simple and standard.

Making a slide show is really a simple process. Just take the slides of the descriptions, and drag photos around them of the person who did the saying, hopefully with the celebrant, or a photo of the celebrant that seems applicable to the description. Feel free to skip the rest of this post, because the rant is about to start.

Anything that could go wrong, did. It took a while to get the information and photos from others. (I didn't give them much time, so that was more my fault than theirs.) I had this wonderful new program that makes scrapbook pages, Scrapbook Factory. It also has slide show capability, although I came to find out that it was a separate program (PicturetoTV) that didn't work well with each other. Not a big deal, but I did a test run to see if it would work from start to finish, and it didn't. It kept giving me error messages when I tried to burn it to the disk.

I switched to a different program (Windows Movie Maker) - which meant I had to start all over again arranging the slides. Since the other program took the photos directly from where they were (in many different folders arranged by date), I had to search for all of my pictures all over again. This program wasn't very user-friendly, and if you made a mistake, you pretty much had to start over again.

Then I found out that my DVD burner wasn't installed on the computer. It wasn't working earlier, and my daughter had switched out the drives, so I only had a player, and not a burner. I was going to buy one, but I decided to try installing it again, and it worked just fine. Finding music was also hard. I'll spare you the music rant.

I finally got two finished. I was working on burning the second one when I got an error message. There are two software programs at work here too - one that makes the movie, and one that burns it (Windows DVD Maker). I forgot to save it before I tried to burn it, and yes, the entire thing disappeared. I am sure I saved it sometime in the middle of the project, but when I remembered I hadn't saved, I saved over the file, and apparently it I saved the disappeared project over the half done project. I had to start all over again, although this time I had been smart enough to save everything I wanted to use in one folder. I had to rearrange the stuff all over again.

I was up until 3 in the morning (and I don't function well after 9), and I only managed to finish 2 of the slide shows. And they certainly weren't the quality project I was hoping for, especially for having worked on it for three weeks. I tried to work on the last one in the morning, but I had to finish getting ready for the party. My nephew and brother-in-law came over and helped decorate and wrap presents, which was a tremendous help, but my daughter's slide show did not get done.

Sorry about all this whining, but I have to document this for that the next time I think about a slide show. I still have the word "fun" attached to the word "slide show", but I really don't know why.

4 comments:

Elaine Adair said...

You still get a "10" for effort!!! What a great idea!

Allie said...

Oh dear - thanks for the warning, I think that would be way too technical for me! I love the idea for it though.

Michele Bilyeu said...

It's the thought that counts etc.etc. etc. I've done it all and then some and always waited too long and started too late no matter what the intentions. Hey, you tried and 2 out of 3 isn't so bad. Did you do DD's yourself out loud then and make her acted out her compliments ;)

Tanya said...

Wow! That's a great cake and fantastic cupcakes! What a neat idea! The Japanese is perfect and the plum blossom tree on the cake is a beauty! Do we ever get to see the slide show?