How to Make a Movie for Television Screen from Still Photos and Music

Mike Dean at O’Reilly shows how to create an engaging video for the large TV screen using your digital photographs and music files.

Suggestion 1: Use NTSC Safe for Television - “NTSC safe” is a slightly reduced color range (a.k.a. “color set” or “color space”) that looks good on TV sets. Non-NTSC-safe video looks really blown out and crunchy on TV. Suggestion 2: TV screens will stretch still images in video a little from what you see on your computer screen. If you want to compensate for this, crop your images to 720 x 540, and then uncheck the “constrain proportions” box in Photoshop’s resizing dialog (Image > Image Size) and squish to 720 x 480. Then it will look perfect on a TV. Suggestion 3: Using relatively large images — around 2,000 x 1,000 pixels — is good. Even though the video editing program resizes all NTSC-DV images to 720 x 480 pixels on output, you will probably want to do some cropping first to get more creative looks, and close cropping can look awesome, especially if you do a series of several closer crops on the same image. Throwing in a small image, like 300 x 200 pixels, can be a nice effect. It’s grainy in a computer-destroyed way that looks cool for an occasional accent. Link.