My finished photo slideshow - grateful thanks to forum members

Hi all,
I just finished my latest version of my photo slideshow. If you’d like to see it, here it is:

I used a great deal of collective wisdom and guidance from this forum to create this, so I’d like to say a huge THANKS to everyone who helped me.

I thought I’d list a few specific techniques I used in this slideshow.

  1. Opening zooming map: Zoom - keyframes (size and position). I made the outer edges transparent by using the Chroma Key (simple) filter. I learned how to do this from this forum some months ago.

  2. Opening animated text (Bournville) - I designed this by writing HTML code and using forum member Elusien’s WebVfx framework to animate it.

  3. Text “in photos” - created with text filter, applied to a clip on track V2 with opacity set to 0, and positioned. Fade in and out was applied using the throbber. Steve Ledger told me about the throbber in a forum post many months ago!

  4. Main part of the slideshow - done by importing my photos into a folder and using Elusien’s automatic “slideshow” feature wihin his WebVfx framework. Brilliant and simple to use, thanks Neil.

  5. Animated Captions (“Rest House On Bournville Green” etc…). These are created using a plug-in contributed to this forum by Inocynt (Piotr) in this post:
    Couple of my shotcut plugins

Again, a brilliant resource. More people should be making use of this I feel (maybe I should send a post “plugging” these plugins!!) - it’s easy to set up - download the relevant files from Piotr’s github page, paste them into the shotcut filters directory and “Approach Animated Text” appears as an option in the filter list. Thanks, Piotr!

Finally, 5) background music - this is my own composition (actually a piano improvisation I just created in one take). I wanted to add gently flowing music to the slides. I played the music directly into Cubase while viewing the slideshow. I filmed me creating this music and made a tutorial video from the footage showing how I did it:

So I am grateful to lots of forum members for teaching me how to employ these techniques. And of course thanks to Dan and the developers for continuing to update and improve this amazing software!

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Great video, Jon!

It’s neat to see all of these components that you’ve been posting about come together. Nice job with the music, single-take improv is impressive and it goes very well with the video.

I have one question about the borders around the entire frame and individual photos. While I recognize that this may be just an aesthetic choice, I’m wondering: do these borders also serve some sort of function, such as hiding some kind of artifacts? (For example, though this doesn’t seem like it would be the case in your video, there’s a filter – I want to say the Blur filter? – that causes distortion at the very edge of whatever it’s applied to.)

Thanks john_solo! I did learn one thing from making these videos - video editing is a lot of hard work!! - but it’s also huge fun :sunglasses::sunglasses: and very satisfying…

About the borders - Elusien’s slideshow feature gives you these automatically, although the size/colour can be changed by tweaking the HTML. You can also put background images as borders, as Elusien has done in his demo HERE. I decided to use two shades of green to represent the greenness of my neighbourhood. The idea of adding a blur filter appeals to me - I’ll look into that when I get time. Jon

thank you . i enjoyed learning this.Editing is not just about creativity but also about how youtake advantage of the latest technologies.

Indeed. Thank you.