Lovely piece of work John. Beautiful images. The opening panorama is really impressive and your own special brand of reveal works wonderfully.

Filled with creative ideas by pushing the limits of PS3.

Well done John.

For those getting started with PS3, a detailed "How To" chapter/verse tutorial with illustrations involving each step of the 2:08 minute video may be worthwhile.

And again 'well done' with your Budapest presentation.

Thanks James, I also think that indeed the photos are rather good, considering the fact that they were taken with a very small compact camera Canon Ixus 800 IS. and without a tripod.

The opening panoramic image was put together out of 2 photos (2816x1584 each) with Panoramamaker, a program I can recommend: I tried to find the stitching zone without succes. After cropping the image used in the slideshow was 2570x720, exactly what I wanted: I intended only a long horizontal pan and no zoom, and the whole thing rendered using our own 1280x720 Vimeo custom profile (after pre-distortion of course).

All this however doesn't answer your main question, but I would have thought this was cristal-clear: if you have only 16:9 material there is no problem, but if there is also some other format material to be used then I give a few hints what can be done about it.

The whole thing is based upon the same idea as in "Tips and tricks 1", only here we do it , not for fun or to show off, but because we need to.

(So sorry, but now I realise that I never finished the corresponding tutorial! I will do that in a few days!)

To fill the screen, prepare some collages which are all 16:9 of course, with well chosen slices of photos having as format 4:9, 5:9, 6:9, 10:9, 11:9, 12:9 and 16:9, and let the PS3 transitions do their job with them. How to make the collages will be explained in the already mentioned tutorial, and also which collages are needed to get a certain effect.

Come to think of it: I also uploaded a "Tips and tricks 2" which maybe would need a few words of guidance

Very impressive combination of wide-screen, collages, transitions and the VIMEO-HD feature. This clearly shows what you can do with pictures, a free Microsoft utility and creativity. Now I remember the checkerboard demo which I have never used......till now.

I tend to just get out of the way, John, when all the technical talk goes flying by--don't want to get creamed by a flying pixel--but I got a lot of pleasure out of the visual richness of this piece. Thanks for sharing! (Pete Seeger not only sang "Where Have All the Flowers Gone" in the 60s, but wrote it. He's a great American.)

I tend to think of widescreen stories as being nothing more than 'what you see is what you get' in that little motion setting box.

Take any decently high quality picture, edit the motion settings however you want, and save the story using a custom widescreen profile.

The arranging you do for artistic reasons is something else... but 5, 7 or higher megapixel pictures will have plenty of pixels for widescreen stories without having to do any prep at all.

Hi PapaJohn, you are absolutely right there. I forgot to mention the most easy solution.
If both the resolution of the photo in terms of pixel size and the quality of the photo (which is something quite different) allows it, then of course I can zoom in and pan around as much as I like.
However as I wrote in another reply photos were taken with a 6 MB compact camera without a tripod and then you sometimes do not obtain an optimal result ( that is why I am thinking about buying a reflex camera one of these days)
Another reason for using the collage technique would be when I have a 4:3 or 3:2 photo completely filled with the subject, and I want to show the whole subject in my slideshow without black borders
But otherwise this collage technique is indeed as you wrote merely to be used for " artistic " reasons .