Even in the age of instant digital photography, we still have to take the time to assemble our photo albums either during or after a vacation tour. Although the day-to-day blogs have features selected photos, I decided to group all of the photos that were fit to print (and some that are questionable, but fall under the category of “art” or convey a sense of the journey not captured otherwise) into a group of video montages.

To do this, I merged photos from our still cameras and phones, renaming them as needed to fit them in the proper sequence. I wrote a short Perl script that uses ImageMagick to crop and resize the photos into wide-screen format suitable for the movie software, then renames them in the sequence pattern needed by the film editor. I then created an image sequence film, specifying the number of frames per photos to generate a fairly rapid slideshow sequence, and set it to music obtained from the royalty-free selections on www.freemusicarchive.org, with titles. I use the OpenShot video editor on Ubuntu Linux, and upload to the Vimeo video streaming site. I ended up with three short clips, averaging three minutes each, of the Michigan, Wisconsin, and train trip portions of our tour.

Michigan montage from Larye Parkins on Vimeo.

Wisconsin montage from Larye Parkins on Vimeo.

Train montage from Larye Parkins on Vimeo.

I have an hour or more of video footage taking with the GoPro handlebar camera that I am working on editing down to short films representing the stages of our tour, as well, but that will take a bit more time…