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- Decide what collections of photographs, slides, negatives, and/or VHS tape video clips you want to submit to River City Image Works for a particular project.
- Assess the condition of the slides or negatives to be submitted, bearing in mind...
- If the images are in good condition (meaning that they have not faded and that the overall color balance and exposure look good), you can order "basic scanning". This means that human involvement is not necessary to manually adjust scanning parameters and you will pay the lowest processing rates.
- If the images require manual adjustment, an additional processing rate will apply (see Price List).
- That River City Image Works routinely deals with three standards for image quality:
- unsuitable for subsequent processing without manual adjustment
- suitable for video production but requiring manual adjustment for the printed page
- suitable for printing with little, if any, adjustment
- Do not worry that your opinion may not agree with ours. If we disagree with your assessment, we will contact you with our suggestions before any work is done.
- Please make sure that each picture is numbered unambiguously. If the slides are in slide trays or boxes, it is all right to merely number the trays/boxes and instruct us to take the slides in order from the numbered containers.
- To aid in specifying the details of your project, and to enable our Sales Department to provide an accurate price quotation, please send e-mail to sales@rivercityimageworks.com, describing your project. The types of information to tell us are discussed below (and you can click here to find a summary of items to include in your e-mail):
- For how long a period of time should each image be displayed? (A good starting point is 5 seconds/image, but you can select from 3 to 15 seconds/image at no additional charge.)
- How many images will be incorporated? (River City Image Works will produce slide shows of up to 120 minutes long on one DVD; if you choose 5 seconds/image, this allows inclusion of up to about 1400 images.)
- How would you like your images to follow one another in the finished production? We recommend either that each image "dissolves" into the next or that each fades to black, followed by the new image fading from black. However, if you'd rather have images immediately replace each other, without any transitional effects, we can do that for you.
- Do you want background music? Copyright laws prohibit us from utilizing anything other than "royalty-free" music, so state your preference for music type (see information sheet for quotation request); you will probably enjoy the music we select for you.
- What title screens do you want in the video? Should we build the title screens on a plain background or should we utilize one of your images as the background?
- Would you like a menu or menus in place of title screens (or in addition to title screens)?
- Would you like your video in FULL SCREEN format or in WIDESCREEN format? (Check out our advice on the video format recommendation page.)
- How many copies of the video would you like? Please note that since the videos are created on the computer and then transferred to DVD, all copies of a video are "master copies" or "originals". We do NOT make one master copy and then duplicate it to other media (with the degradation of quality that this "dubbing" process might involve).
- Pack your order securely and send it to us. For details concerning the ordering process, go to the Video Orders page.
- When we receive the order, we will scan all images, either automatically or manually. Please note that if the "aspect ratio" (i.e., the height-to-width ratio) of the image does not match that of the video frame, the resulting image will have black borders on the sides or on the top and bottom; River City Image Works is careful not to distort the image! Also, some television sets routinely crop out the outer portions of an image, so peripheral portions of your images may not display. After scanning your images, we build any required title screens and assemble the images and titles into a "storyboard". Transitional effects and music are added (if desired) and then your video is "produced" by computer. Finally, the computer-generated movie is transferred to high-quality DVD discs. Depending upon the scope of your project, please allow up to three weeks in-house for job completion.
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