How to create a pictures VideoCD with transitions and continuous background music

• Introduction
• Slide Show Movie Maker to create a video slideshow with with transitions and continuous background music
• TMPGEnc as MPEG encoder
• VCDEasy to create the VideoCD itself

A lot of users of VCDEasy would like to have audio (comments or background music) with their MPEG Stills (MPEG Pictures)... Audio with MPEG Stills is not possible according to the VideoCD specifications... BUT you can make a video (SVCD for better quality) from a slideshow, then add audio to the slideshow video... Note that with the MPEG stills approach you can have a better quality of your pictures than with a video made from a slideshow of pictures... You have to choose between quality and transitions/audio...

This is how some "SlideShow VideoCD" authoring tools work... You add pictures, choose transitions, and add background music. These tools then create, in the background, a video (encoded to MPEG on the fly)... This is smart, but the quality of the pictures on the TV is usually not as good as with true MPEG Stills...

This guide describes the creation of a pictures slideshow with transitions and continuous background music, as an MPEG file for a PAL VideoCD (PAL MPEG1 file for VCD2.0). If your home DVD player is able to read SVCDs, better do SVCD instead of VCD because you then will have a better quality for your pictures (the resolution is higher)

Slide Show Movie Maker:

Slide Show Movie Maker ("SSMM") (freeware) is able to create a .avi video file from a picture list with fading (transitions) between pictures, with continuous background music, and with text fade in and out (and has many more effects...)

Download SSMM here. Note that the "Unicode Version" of SSMM must not be used on Win9x/WinMe
See the SSMM user manual for information on each setting.
Important: Slide Show Movie Maker FAQ

This guide is an example on how to create a video file from a list of pictures with transitions and continuous background music. SSMM is a powerful tool. I use here only a small number of its fucntionnalities.

You can find a similar guide on www.dvdrhelp.com but with MovieXone instead of SSMM.

Slide Show Movie Maker reads BMP and JPG files, so you may need to convert your picture to one of these formats before using SSMM. You can use, for example, the excellent IrfanView (freeware) to make such conversion in batch mode.

Start "Slide Show Movie Maker".
Launch the Wizard, in order to add the pictures and set a few options.

	You should see here the location (you entered via the wizard) of the output video file
	Movie Size... Well this is not easy to give a good aswer here... Note that the aim is to have the best video quality as possible. SSMM may resize your pictures, as well as your MPEG encoder. But, to avoid too much quality loss, better avoid too much resize. So, 2 approaches here: 1) MPEG encoder based resize: enter a size closed to your picture's original size, thus SSMM won't resize too much your pictures, the true resize will be done by the MPEG encoder... As an example, if your pictures are 1536x1024 (landscape) and 1024x1536 (portrait), it may be a good idea to enter 1536x1024... But entering a big size here will make the video creation time quite long (can be a few hours if you have many picture and a quite big size...)...  2) SSMM based resize: enter the size which will avoid your MPEG encoder from resizing again your pictures. This "best size" depends on what you planned to create (MPEG1 or MPEG2, PAL or NTSC). For a video, the VideoCD standard says: 352 x 240 - NTSC VCD 2.0 352 x 240 - FILM VCD 2.0 352 x 288 - PAL VCD 2.0 480 x 480 - NTSC SVCD 1.0 480 x 576 - PAL SVCD 1.0 But the MPEG encoder will perform aspect ratio correction, so here is the size you should size, depending on the VideoCD you planned to create: 320 x 240 for NTSC VCD 2.0 320 x 240 for FILM VCD 2.0 384 x 288 for PAL VCD 2.0 640 x 480 for NTSC SVCD 1.0 768 x 576 for PAL SVCD 1.0 As for this guide I will create a PAL MPEG file for VCD 2.0 (MPEG1), i.e with a final size at 352 x 288, I entered 384x288 in .
	Because TV is doing cropping (usually 5%), you should add some margins. To do so, enter: 15 pixels as margins for VCD 30 pixels as margins for SVCD  As for this guide I will create a PAL MPEG file for VCD 2.0, I entered15 here in .
	Enter here: 25 if you planned to create a PAL MPEG file (PAL is mainly used in Eupore and Asia) 29.97 if you planned to create a NTSC MPEG file (NTSC is mainly used in North America)

Then click "Ok" to go back to the main window:

	You can see here your pictures. You can sort them by filename, or order them the way you want. It is important to understand that when you do a change, it applies to the pictures selected in . Below are some examples:
	Let's put (randomly) a transition ("Fading") between all pictures. Select all your pictures: click on "Select All" (), then click on "Add random fadings" ()
	By default, all pictures have their filename as "Picture Text". The aim here in my example, is to put "Corsica 2004" on the first picture, then no text for all other pictures: Let's remove all the texts: select all picture (), remove the text in , then click Let's put "Corsica 2004" on the first picture: in click on the first picture (all other pictures should be unselected), then type "Corsica 2004" in and finally click on

	Select a music (it must be a .wav file, PCM 16-bit stereo 44,1 KHz)
	Click on "Loop Audio"

Finally, let's create the video file...

	Choose the quality
	Choose here a video compression method. It must preserve quality as much as possible. Microsoft MPEG-4 or DivX is a good choice (as long as your MPEG encoder will be able to read the video files that use this compression method). You can also select "uncompressed"... no quality loss but this will create a huge file!
	"PCM - CD Audio Quality" is a good choice.
	Click "Start Creation"... and wait!

At the end, you should have an avi file with your pictures, transitions and background music! Next step is to encode this file to MPEG for VideoCD (for example with TMPGEnc) and finally use VCDEasy to create the VideoCD itself.

The aim here is to encode an .AVI file (DV, DivX, XviD,... for example) to an MPEG file (MPEG1 in this example) for VideoCD.
I am using TMPGEnc for that. TMPGEnc is, for me, the best MPEG encoder. It produces very good (quality and compliance) MPEG files for VideoCDs.

I am not a TMPGEnc expert and do not understand all TMPGEnc settings. There are lots of guide about TMPGEnc which will give you good information. Among them:

• "TMPGEnc MPEG Encoder Help"
• "TMPGEnc Explained V2.0.1"
• "AVI, DV, DivX, XviD, ASF, MOV, nAVI, SMR, WMV to VCD MPEG"

Launch TMPGEnc, then launch its project wizard (from the "File" menu)

	Select here the project type. In this guide, it is VideoCD VCD 2.0, PAL.
	Nothing to change here for a VCD 2.0
	Click "Next"...

Select the source file...

	Select the video file you want to encode to MPEG. If it contains an Audio stream, the field "Audio File" will be automatically filled with the same filename.
	Video Type and Field order are detected automatically by TMPGEnc, so you should let these values as they are.
	The aspect ratio depends on your vidéo and from where it comes from (DVD, DV, ...). In the case of a SlideShow (computer generated to be viewed on a computer) choose 1:1 (VGA). In our case (video file generated by SSMM from PC Pictures, i.e the source is computer generated to be viewed on a computer), choose 1:1 (VGA). Note that another aspect ratio should be selected when the source comes from a DVD or a DV camcorder for example.
	Click "Next"...

Filter settings...

	This filter allows you to specify a start and end video frame for encoding. So, do not use "Source Range" if the entire video should be encoded.
	This filter allows a clipping region to be specified on the original source video. This is often use to remove the border of the source video, as TMPGEnc will had some borders/margins itself if needed. In the case of a SlideShow made with SSMM, if you already tweaked size and borders, then there is nothing to do here.
	This filter is useful when the source comes from an analogue video signal, i.e when you have source material with visible noise, try this filter out. In the case of a video produced on the computer (SlideShow for example), or of a DVD, do not use this filter otherwise it may introduce some blurring in the MPEG video.
	Click on "Other Settings"

Other Settings: "Video" Tab:

	Choose "Higest quality" there. (Note that the more quality you want, the more processing time will be longer)
	Select the "Advanced" tab

Other Settings: "Advanced" Tab:

	You can see here what we had in the second page of the project wizard... Already customized for our needs.
	Choose "Full Screen (keep aspect ratio)" here.
	Normally, nothing to use here
	Select the "GOP Structure" tab

Other Settings: "GOP Structure" Tab:

Let the settings as they are, except that you can enable "Output bistream for edit"

Let the settings of the 3 remaings tabs as they are.
Click "Ok" to go back to the project wizard.

Bitrate Settings...

Click "Next"...

Specify output file name...

	Enter here the filename of the MPEG video output file
	Check "Start encoding immediately"
	Click "Ok"... and wait... the encoding process may be long...

Once your MPEG file is created, you can add it to VCDEasy, and make your VideoCD.

	Select the project type. In this guide: VCD 2.0 PAL
	Select your CD writer here (or select "CD Image Recoder" if you want to create the VideoCD as CD image file ready to be burnt/mounted)
	Check "Burn"...
	Specify here the number of copies you want
	Use the button "Add Files" to add in VCDEasy the MPEG file generated previously. If you prefer, you can also drag'n drop your MEPG file from a Windows Explorer to
	This bar tells you the size the VideoCD will have. If you let your mouse a few second over this bar, you will have more information.
	Finally, click on "Go"