Digital AV Evening - 25 Jan 2007

On Thursday 25th January TPS had its first audio-visual (AV) members evening. An AV is a projected series of still photographs linked by a music track. A few weeks before our evening meeting was a training session about making audio-visuals. It was given by Jayne Britton, one of our more experienced members. The enthusiasm that this generated amongst the members resulted in 12 AVs being entered for our first specialised AV meeting. The majority of the AVs entered were from beginners and covered a diverse set of subjects ranging from the Biggin Hill air show to moody Scottish landscapes, from flora and fauna to a rock concert, and travelogues to transport. The quality of all of them was excellent, not a dull one amongst them. Either they are very easy to make or we have high calibre members.

Twin projector, cross fade slide film AVs have been popular since the mid 70s but the equipment necessary to make sophisticated shows was expensive and required high levels of photographic and sound recording skills. Digital imaging has changed all that. The club owns the projection and audio equipment for presenting the shows. All the photographer needs is a digital camera, a home PC, some inexpensive software, unlimited spare time (it can get addictive) and unbridled creativity. The addition of the music track adds a dimension to the stills that can make a 3 minute show really come alive. It was a very successful evening and, we hope, just the first of many.

To add some technical details: the software that can be used to produce a digital AV is many and varied, and our members used several different packages, the most popular of which were:

All the packages allow captions to be applied, images to fade from one to another in a variety of ways, as well as panning and zooming motion. Below are some sample screenshots from the AVs showing some of the effects in use: