Son's response:
You’re suggesting a project that would be ridiculously time consuming and I don’t think the end result would be very effective.
My reaction was that some of the ideas might work, but waaaaay out of my time availability.
There are a couple of ways the DVD presentation might work:
1) A movie file that plays. Perhaps each book chapter has its own menu item (scene) on the DVD menu. Each “screen” would be a selection of text that would fit comfortably on the screen so people could read it. The DVD would play the pages, staying on each page for XX seconds and automatically moving on the next one at a specified period of time (e.g. 30 seconds). This would be tiresome for the reader, because people read at different speeds and you’re unlikely to hit on the correct time period.
2) A DVD slideshow in which the person has to skip forward each page manually. I don’t know off hand how this would be done, but I assume it is possible; particularly if you set up each TV page as a separate “scene” on the DVD.
3) Scrolling text that just continues to scroll at a specific speed. I assume that there are some editing software programs that allow you to create “crawling titles/text”, but I don’t know what the limits are on how much text you can put in one title-crawl box and it would mean that the text is crawling unless the person pauses the DVD. Then you have the issue of getting back to that part in the book when you take a break and turn off the DVD.
The first two methods would require you create a separate “TV page” for each TV page image that you want to display. That means cutting and pasting the text into some document and ultimately saving each page as some sort of image file. Those image files (pages) would then be imported into the DVD creation software. Creating each individual page would be an nightmare…, regardless of whether you’re using PPT or not.
The third method might be easier if a larger amount of text can be copied and pasted into a crawling title – but you’d need the editing software and I don’t know how good it would look.
OK – I tried it with Windows Live Movie maker (can download it free from Microsoft).
Under the HOME tab, there is a button called “credits”. You can simply cut and paste text into that and you’ll have scrolling text. You’ll have to play around with it to find the correct speed of the crawl, based on the amount of text you paste. The default is 7secs, but I was able to change that to 3,000 without any problems!
Create the credits clip. Then copy and paste the text into the text entry field. Then double-click on the timeline – on the pink part where it says CREDITS (or the first few words of whatever text you replaced “credits” with) and you should see the duration box come up with 7sec – you can change that and experiment to see what seems like a good crawl speed.
This would definitely be the quickest way to get your text on a DVD. You could create a new credit clip for each c