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How to Make a Photo DVD disk yourself

Photo to DVD has been one of our most popular services requested by our customers. Often they asked our questions on how they can do a photo-to-DVD disk themselves. Well here are some helpful hints.

Although a really fancy photo-to-DVD production will probably need involving a professional service, you can do a very decent photo DVD if you are really into it.

Photo-to-DVD is not a simple transfer from photos to a DVD recordable disk. Of course that is ok if you just need a DVD disk with a lot of photos in it and you can play the disk in most DVD players on today's markets. Let's say you want some photo slide show with transition in between each photos accompanying with well timed music.

Step 1: digitalizing photos

You may use old-time physical photos found in old photo albums; you may need photos that are framed at your or your grandparents' homes; you may even use some old documents such as newspaper clippings. You have to carefully prepare these photo sources for proper scanning.? Nowadays you can buy a very decent photo scanner from Circuit City for a couple of hundred dollars.?

I need to remind you one thing: if a photo is too big to scan, you will have to visually divide the photo into scan-able parts and scan them separately; then you need to use software to stitch them together to look like the original. The most popular software for this is Adobe Photoshop, but you can find some inexpensive basic software such as Adobe Photo Element.

Step 2: make your digital photos ready for montage

Your photos probably come in different dimensions and resolutions. Resolution is not quite an issue since it will change later on when photos are ready for montage. Photos with different dimensions need to be cropped to the same proportion for the montage purpose.? Preferably all photos should change to the 4:3 landscape formats to suit the standard TV screen (or 16:9 widescreen depending on your needs).? If a photo is originally a portrait, you need to pat black or white strips on both vertical sides so you change them into a landscape format.

Step 3: prepare the music to match your photos

First you need to line up all your photos into the order you want them to be. A typical way is to add numbers into filenames, such as photo01.jpg, photo02.jpg, etc. Then you need to calculate how long all the photo will play in the montage. Assume each photo plays 6 seconds (including 1 second transition time) and you have 50 photos, that is 5-minute worth video. Now comes to the music.? You can rip your favorite songs from your music collection and try to time to the photo sequence.

Step 4: montage photos into the movie editing software

One of the best software for mounting your photos into video DVD is Adobe Premiere. You drag and drop all photos in order into the timeline in order; you add the transition effect; and then you drag and drop your chosen music file into the audio track and time the music to the intended beginning and ending of photos. Then let it render and you should get a DVD compliant video file. Be sure to keep the source project file until you are totally satisfied with the result.

Step 5: authoring your video file into DVD

This is straightforward. You just open your DVD authoring software, pop in a blank recordable DVD disk. Once the writing process is finished, you should be able to play the new disk on any DVD player.

Now you are done with your home Photo DVD project!