I’ve created a video slideshow of Hamish’s second year starting from his first birthday when we were at Disneyland Paris. I used Lightroom to select the images — it’s great for that kind of thing as you can select all photos between two dates and then filter down to specific tags, in this case Hamish. Then use colours or flags to narrow down the selection and finally export out to jpg.

Once that was done, I imported into iPhoto 08 and did a slideshow that way, but it really doesn’t give you very much control. So I tried it in iMovie and that worked a lot better. I’m used to the more traditional non-linear editors, specifially Premiere Pro, so iMovie looked a little weird at first. I did some of the online tutorials on Apple’s site and it was then really easy to get the music imported, adjust the duration etc. I think the iApps are really great for creating media like this and the suite of apps goes together really very well. It’s a shame that Lorraine hasn’t the time to learn how to do this as I’m sure that she would enjoy it, particularly as she’s got the 24-inch iMac; I’m doing it on a Macbook!

The hardest part of the project was picking out the music. Lorraine did help with that.

And finally I got it uploaded to the web. I tried Vimeo this time rather than YouTube as I’m not keen on how YT compresses video. Although Vimeo seems to have done the same sort of thing. I’ll perhaps try different export settings from iMovie and see if that makes a difference.

The next thing to do is the same thing for Freya’s third year. For each of them their birthday spans the move from Lux to Scotland so it’s an important year for us all. Once it’s all done, we’re going to put it all on DVD for sending to friends and family.

It’s really great having all this digital media and I could see my photography improving through the year as I picked out the photos. And Lightroom really does rock, seriously.

So, without any further ado, here are the fruits of my labour. Enjoy!