Prepping your photos
for video
Photo
overlays add interest to your family history video, and they cover up breaks
where you’ve trimmed down the interview footage. Since there’s a number of
difficult tasks when videotaping photos—proper lighting, maintaining
perspective, good framing, smooth motion—the best way to get the photos into
your video is to bring in digital copies. Once into a photo editing program,
there are limitless ways you can add variety to them—isolate individuals,
change the background or color, composites.
But
you can’t just import the photos into the video editing program and put them on
the timeline. Well, you can, but our goal is to give the video a professional
look. There are a couple of problems with many photos:
-
Video orientation
(landscape) vs. photo orientation (portrait)
-
Monitor pixels vs. television pixels
Scan your family photos at 300 dpi, RGB mode, and save as TIFF files. Make
a duplicate copy and save it to a folder for video photos. This is the copy you
will use for the video. It’s often the case that you have only one or two
photos of a person of interest in the interview. I make several versions of
those limited photos.
Landscape vs. portrait
Video frames are wider than they are high (landscape) at 4:3 aspect ratio, or, in the case of wide screen, 16:9. Doesn’t matter whether it’s NTSC (North America, Japan, Korea, South Africa, part of Brazil), SECAM (France, part of Greece) or PAL (the rest of the world); computer
monitor or television. Many of the photos in the average collection are taller
than they are wide (portrait). If you put a portrait oriented photo into your family
history video as is, it will have black borders on two sides.
Crop the photos so they have
the proper aspect. Many photos
have a lot of empty space above and below the central figures. Those are easy
to reorient; just lop that empty space off. Zero in on what’s important in the
photo and eliminate the rest. Then there are those that you want to show the
entire photo. You can just work with the photo and black sides or add
background to the picture with a clone tool or color.
Square pixels vs. rectangular pixels
This is only a problem if you plan to make a DVD out of
your movie and watch it on a television. Computer monitor pixels are
square.
Television and video monitors stretch the square pixels
sideways making them rectangular. Your video program and computer somehow take
care of this difference so that video viewed on either a computer or television
screen looks ok, but it gets a little confused when something generated in a
square pixel environment (photo editing program) is imported into the
rectangular world of video. These images get squished.
Most video editing programs
now have a simple solution. When you’re ready to export your family history movie,
click on “Maintain aspect ratio” or whatever is similar in your editing
program. Not available in Movie Maker or iMovie. You will have to manually
alter the images before importing them into these video editing programs.
1|2|3 Next> Crop for video frame size
2. Crop for video frame size
3. Resize photos for video manually
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Copyright September 2009 Family History Coach All rights reserved Last update April 27, 2010
