Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
When family or friends come to visit, we usually end up taking a lot of pictures. We could share those pictures on social networking sites or dump them on a private ftp server, but, as shocking as it sounds, not everyone in our family has a permanent Internet connection. To solve this problem we needed to come up with a little imaginative thinking, the solution: imagination.
Imagination is an easy-to-use DVD slideshow creator based on GTK+2 libraries. It’s lightweight, requiring only a few small files, and, best of all, very easy to use. Imagination is available in the Ubuntu Universe repositories so a simple sudo apt-get install imagination is all you need to get started.
When you first create a new project with imagination, you’ll be prompted to choose the video format, size and background color. Current versions of imagination have four choices VOB (DVD video), OGV (Theora vorbis video), FLV (Flash video), and 3GP for mobile phones. We like to send family and friends home with a DVD, so we chose to export to VOB format. There are also four size choices to choose from 720×480 NTSC, 720×576 PAL, 1280×720 HD and 1920×1080 HD. Choose the size that best suits your region of the world.
Adding photographs is a simple matter of either selecting Slideshow > Import Pictures from the menu, or clicking on the small black picture frame icon from the icon bar (just under the Slide menu option). Use CTRL or SHIFT to selectively identify the pictures to import (or select all), and click Open. Once you’ve added pictures, reordering is a simple matter of dragging the pictures at the bottom of the interface so they’re in the order you want them to be.
If you don’t like the orientation of a slide, you can rotate the slide by selecting the appropriate button under the Slide menu option. You can also add a blank slide. Blank slides can be a solid color or either a linear or radial gradient. If you’re creating a slideshow with multiple sections or locations, it’s sometimes helpful to insert a blank slide with some information. To add text to the slide, first click on the slide, then click over in the Slide Text section on the right-hand-side and enter your text. Click the font choice to bring up a dialog box that lets you choose the font family, style and size. Beside the font, there are a couple of colors for the font foreground and background. Below this are some animation settings so you can make the text fade, slide or grow. The same text options can be used on regular photographic slides, but make sure you don’t have all slides chosen or the option appears greyed out.
This is a slide show, of course, and a slide show wouldn’t be complete without some kind of between-frame animation. To provide uniform transitions from slide to slide, select all the slides (choose one slide then hit CTRL+A), and choose a Transition type from the slide settings near the top right of the interface (Crossfade is a nice effect).
A small icon of the transition is displayed on each picture at the bottom of the interface so you know which slides have which transitions. You might be tempted to create a different transition for each slide - don’t do it, looking at multiple transitions is bad form.
All this concentration on pictures and we haven’t even added any audio yet. Before we do, have a look at the Slideshow length under the Slide settings on the top left. Each slide’s display time is adjustable, you could display a picture longer for the first and last slides if you wanted. The length of the slideshow will determine how long a song (or songs) you’ll need. You can add multiple songs.
To add music, click the black frame with the music note in it, or click Slideshow > Import Music from the menu. To reorder the music, click the Audio tab, the song you want to reorder, and the move file up or down arrows at the bottom of the audio tab. Remember to select enough music to cover the entire slideshow. Take into consideration the length of the slideshow if you’re trying to hit a particular point in a song. Remember you can always adjust slide length, but this can be tricky since you don’t also want people to get bored looking at the same slide for too long.
At the top of the interface there’s a play icon that lets you preview the slideshow. In version 3.0-r1, the play option didn’t seem to play our music, it only transitioned through the slides, however when we exported the slideshow to VOB format, the music played just fine.
One thing to note when saving the VOB file: be sure to add the .vob extension, imagination doesn’t seem to do this by default. After exporting the VOB file, we now need to get it to DVD. To create the DVD we need to create the DVD structure. First make a dvd/ directory, mkdir dvd. Next make sub-directories called VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS, mkdir dvd/VIDEO_TS dvd/AUDIO_TS (note the space between VIDEO_TS and dvd/AUDIO_TS). Now copy the exported VOB file to the dvd/VIDEO_TS and run the mkisofs command to make an ISO file that can be burned by k3b, Brasero or XFburn:
mkisofs -dvd-video -o mydvdname.iso dvd/
Where mydvdname.iso is the name you want to give your ISO file. The VOB file should be in your dvd/VIDEO_TS directory or this won’t work correctly. Now you’re ready to burn multiple copies of your slideshow movie.
Some people reviewing imagination have mentioned that this doesn’t give you fancy menus. For that, programs like DeVeDe or KMediaFactory (old) can help.
I’ve glossed over a few options available in imagination, with a little thought and toying it’s possible to come up with some amazing slideshows. There are over 50 transitions, the ability to overlay text and music, hold slides for longer periods, and reorder any slide. What you come up with is really up to your imagination.