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- How to Create a Video Montage of Old Photos & Memories with trakAxPC
- Wednesday, April 07, 2010
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It was my parents’ 40th wedding anniversary this weekend and my family had got together to plan a surprise party for them. One of our brothers lives with his family in New Zealand, so I wanted to include them somehow in the party. I had asked him to record a short video message from his kids that I could play on the night. After seeing how cute the message that he had sent over was, I decided to include it as part of an overall video montage that would try and capture some of the great memories from my parents’ 40 years together.
Making a video montage from old photos or videos is such an easy process, but can be so powerful that I thought it would make an interesting blog to show how I went about making it. It is a really great centrepiece for so many events - important birthdays, retirement parties, bachelorette parties, anniversaries, baby’s first year - the list goes on! It also makes a really thoughtful gift that you can enjoy after the party.
Firstly here is my finished video and below I will bring you step by step through creating the video:
Gather your Content and Scan the photos
The first step is to gather all your old photos and any video footage that you may have. You then have to get scanning. I found scanning the photos in batches much quicker that scanning the photos individually. However, my scanner is pretty ancient, so perhaps your scanner may be quicker.
You may want to draft up a quick storyboard - do you want to tell a story with the photos/ show the footage chronologically/ play songs that are particularly meaningful for the person?
Create your Mix
The next step is to start creating your mix in trakAxPC. My video was pretty straightforward - 4 songs, some text, photos displayed with either a crossfade, a simple transition and some with no transition and 1 video clip.
To create the video, it is simply a case of dragging and dropping your media into the Mixing screen and placing it where you want it to appear in the timeline. If you are completely new to trakAxPC, you may want to check out the following video tutorials:
I simply used the default YouTube HD settings when creating my video, but if you know you will be showing your video on a square monitor / screen etc. you may want to change your Target Frame Size.
Export your Mix
The next step is to export your mix - I normally use the MPEG 4 (Level 4) setting, but feel free to play around with the Export settings and choose a format that suits your needs.
The final issue you have to decide is how to show your video on the big night. There are various options that you can explore. I think the easiest is to bring your laptop and play your video using something like the VLC player. I simply hooked my laptop up to a large monitor and played my video in fullscreen (see screenshot below), but obviously if you have access to a projector or wide-screen TV, this would work great. You can also burn your mix to a DVD (most PCs now come with DVD burning software such as InterVideo WinDVD) and you can play in through a regular DVD player and TV.
If you have any questions on any of the steps above, please just drop me a comment and I would be happy to help in any way.
Remember, trakAxPC is currently available for the very special price of $24.95 and you can download a 30 day free trial here. -
