Michael Warner II's parents' trip through South America

These video are in DivX format which is compatible with XviD and 3ivX. Depending on what software you use, you may have to rename to files from ".divx" to ".avi". I recommend using VLC Media Player. Click here to download VLC Media Player.

Download trip slide show.

How I made the files

My father brought home hundreds of pictures and a few videos made on his digital camera. I used Pinnacle Studio Plus 10.5 to edit the pictures into a slide show combined with the videos. I drop the pictures into the program and set all pictures and set time length and cross-fades for all. For the higher resolution pictures, I zoom and pan around to show more detail, which is the trickiest part of making these videos. One picture is of a gas station with Mattel toys advertisements on it; I use picture-in-a-picture to simultaneously zoom in the gas station’s sign and carport. I then insert the videos in 3 of 4 videos that my father wanted. I set cross-fades for the videos.

I finish editing by adding background music to the pictures, which are silent. I only have on Latin/Hispanic smart song that came with Pinnacle Studio Plus 10.5 and its smart songs are the only royalty free songs I have. I say “smart” songs because it will automatically fit to the length of time I want.

I save the videos in a high quality video format. I then use Dr. DivX to compress the videos into DivX format. Dr. DivX is the only program I know that will automatically run two passes for compression. This is how you seriously compress video and try to keep as much quality as possible.

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