Soundslides to Video

Soundslides to Video is a quick little program I wrote that can pull in a Soundslides presentation and export it as a video-only AVI file.  A few of my colleagues started using Soundslides to create presentations for the web which, while fun to look at, are difficult to export to media other than the web.  They were interested in exporting some of these presentations to DVD, and I was interested in possibly exporting some of them for podcasting.

Usage and Instructions

Since this was a quick little program, Soundslides to Video is not a very user-friendly application.  It took a very long time to get it into this minimally functional state as it is and I really just don't have the will to fix the few remaining issues.  Nevertheless, it's still a usable program that exports some decent looking video.

Step 1

Place the sondslide to video.exe file in the folder with your slideshow.  It needs to be in the same folder as the soundslides.txt file.  Double-click to start the program

Step 2

Select the options the program should use for exporting video.

Note that resolution and aspect ratio are not necessarily linked.  This allows the user to export video for applications that use non-square pixels (like DVD video).

The program will then ask you to select your AVI compression options.  Select these options as you would for any other AVI saving application.

Step 3

Wait.  Depending on resolution, framerate, and the number of transitions the program can take several minutes to complete.

When the video finishes rendering, the the program will crash.  This is normal and does not mean that there was a problem exporting the video.  Somewhere along the way I'm shutting down the Video For Windows and AVIFile subsystem incorrectly but I've been unable to find the appropriate documentation in MSDN to tell me what I'm doing wrong.  The error happens on literally the last line of the program while the windows API shuts down.

Step 5

At this point, you'll have a soundslide.avi file in the folder with your presentation.  This is the rendered video without sound.  To get sound, you'll need to remux it using whatever process you prefer best.  Personally, my process is:

  1. Open the MP3 audio file in GoldWave.  Save it as a WAV file in the same folder.
  2. Open the soundslide.avi file in VirtualDub.
  3. Select Video->Direct Stream Copy to prevent VirtualDub from re-encoding the video
  4. Select Audio->WAV Audio and select the WAV file you just created in GoldWave.
  5. Select Audio->Full Processing Mode
  6. Select Audio->Compression and select your output compression options
  7. Select File->Save as AVI to export your final video

There are of course other options for other workflows. For example, in Adobe Premiere you could import both the video and the audio, place both onto the project timeline and then group the two.

Download

The program and source code are included in one zip file, along with a "readme" document that repeats most of these instructions.

If you'd like to let me know how it worked out for you, please drop me a line.