Alton Camera Club AV

WELCOME TO OUR NEW AUDIO VISUAL PAGE

DATES FOR YOUR DIARY

17th February 2012 - Meadows Photo Presentation - Judge: Ken Lyndon
23rd March 2012 - The Oak Leaf Salver - A Competition for AV sequences held at North Hants PS.
22nd April 2012 - Mid Hants AV Day - Woosehill Community Hall, Wokingham

NEWS

An audio visual competition for THE KEITH HUNT TROPHY staged by the Woking Photographic Society took place on Saturday 19th November. Seven clubs took part each entereing three sequences. The eventual winner was 'Scotland's Heritage' entered by Norman Horsham of the Mid Thames AV Group

Our entries were: 'Omnibus' by Steve Kirkby, 'My Brother' by Eric Bennett and 'The Snail' by Anne Streeter.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF AV IN OUR CLUB

AV short for Audio Visual, usually refers to the process of producing slide shows with accompanying commentary and /or music. In the days of tape recording and colour slides it was often known as tape/slide.

There is a history of AV in the club which dates back to the 1960's when member Eddie Meadows began to present slide shows using two projectors and a motor driven iris arrangement which enabled him to fade one image into another, thus avoiding the usual blanked out screen between images or seeing one slide moving off the screen and the next slide moving on screen. Ah those were the days.

Eddie encouraged members to experiment with tape/slide by presenting the club in 1964 with a cup which became 'The Meadows Photo-Presentation Award' This cup was originally intended to be awarded to the member judged to have entered the best series of slides or prints monochrome or colour accompanied by live or recorded commentary/music/sound effects. It immediately became a tape/slide competition. In fact only once in over forty years has it had an entry, which in essence was a print talk. In the very early days, entries were presented using one projector. In fact it wasn't until the mid-seventies that two projectors were used utilising a manual fader designed and built by Colin Vincent.

In 1973 a new group was formed within the club. Seventeen members attended the first meeting in May 1973 of what was to become the Audio Group. It settled down to a membership of around a dozen and was soon productive, not only in producing AV sequences but also in constructing such items as a manual fader unit, 9ft square screen and custom made projector stand, plus a number of electronic gadgets enabling automatic slide change and as aids in sound recording. In a very short time the group undertook to present a new show to the club every year. The annual AV evening 'Focus on Sound' was a regular feature of the Club Programme until the year 2000. This annual show soon became the source of an ever increasing library of sequences and the group were soon presenting shows to clubs and organisations over a wide area. In 1977 the group were commissioned by the local council to record the Queen's Silver Jubilee celebrations in Alton. This involved the whole group and several non group members. The resulting audio visual sequence lasted 50 minutes and was first shown in January 1979. Subsequently the sequence was shown over thirty times to local clubs and organisations around the town. It was brought out again in 2002 for the Queen's Golden Jubilee and two shows were given at the Allen Gallery during our Exhibition.

In 1982 members of the group took on the task of staging our Presentation Evening. The original format, of projecting members work from the season prior to awarding the appropriate trophies, is still used today and has continued into the digital age.

Over the years the Audio Group progressed from manual iris faders to manual lamp fader and then an to an old Electrosonics automatic fader unit which had to be converted to work with Zeiss projectors. It had been designed to drive Kodak Carousels. On the sound side they had also moved from reel to reel recorders to standard cassettes; sound on one channel and projector fade signal on the other and then finally to three channel cassettes which gave stereo sound and allowed the third channel to be used solely for projector control.

AV TODAY - THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION

Digital technology has revolutionised audio visual scene. We no longer need two projectors, electronic fade units and multi track cassette recorders. We can do it all on our computers. You may say, 'Ah, but there's the snag. You need a computer.' But let's face it, if you have crossed over into the world of digital photography, you're almost certainly going to have a computer. The point is that armed with some inexpensive software you can now put together an AV sequence transfer it onto a CD and play it on your computer or anybody else's * computer for that matter. You can also put your sequence onto a DVD and view it on your TV. Obviously to show it to a larger audience you'll need a digital projector, screen and some sound equipment. Isn't this one of the reasons we join a Camera Club?

*The two most popular AV software packages ProShow and Pictures to Exe cannot be run on a Mac although P2E are working on a Mac version. It is not known whether the two versions will be interchangeable.

A FEW TIPS ON MAKING AN AV SEQUENCE

Transfer all the images you're going to use and any sound files into a new 'Show Folder' created for the purpose. This is important, when you come to the point where you ask the AV software to load your images it will have all sorts of problems if they are spread across several unspecified folders and perhaps the odd CD or pen drive.

When you come to edit your images in Photoshop or whatever you use, carry out all the usual tasks, levels, crop etc., with one or two additional provisos; you will be fading one image into the next and so you may need to ensure that they match in brightness, colour and sharpness. If you are showing successive images from the same location, a dull shot taken in cloudy dull weather followed by one in bright sunshine and a cloudless sky will tend to stand out.

Try to crop all your pictures the same size. If you must mix landscapes and portrait format try to use them in groups, jumping from one to another tends to jar.

Save your edited images into your 'Show Folder' as Jpegs and number them. If you want to title them as well then put the number first and use 01,02....up to 09 and then 10,11,12..and so on.... This will enable you to upload them in the right order into your sequence in one go, which will save a great deal of dragging and dropping.

How long should you make your sequence? For our own internal AV competition, 'The Meadows Photo-Presentation Award' there is a maximum duration of 8 minutes, but most external AV competitions have a limit of five minutes. So if you're over five minutes the club will not be able to use your AV in Inter-Club competitions.

When you have written and recorded your script, (if you're going to go the whole hog and make an AV complete with commentary and music), chosen and timed your music, collected and edited all your images, you will then be ready to use some AV software in order to put it altogether.

SOME LINKS YOU MAY FIND USEFUL

PicturesToExe
ProShow
Audacity
FotoMagico - for Mac users

Images on this website may not be used or reproduced without permission from the author.