Today was Jett’s second birthday.  We took pictures throughout the day, starting about 10 am and ending about 4:30 pm.  During those 6.5 hours, over 1650 pictures were taken.  Normally my extraordinarily talented wife Toni will turn these pictures into a book printed by the service Shutterfly.  I love these books.  They are very special reminders of our lives and hopefully will be passed onto future generations.

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While reviewing the pictures tonight, I had an idea.  I wondered if it would be possible to very rapidly scan through the pictures and capture the screen at the same time, to produce a short film about Jett’s second birthday.  For this to be possible, the right software and hardware had to be available.  Luckily for me it was.  I used Corel Video Studio 6 for the 30 frames per second screen capture, coupled with Google Picasa to rapidly display the pics, coupled with a very fast graphics card having 2 GB of RAM.   The result was pretty cool – only once did the computer briefly pause during the creation of the film.  The film reminds me of an old-time movie, without sound, but one in which you get a feeling for what happened during Jett’s special day.  I didn’t know that this would be technically possible, but now I’m going to go back into my photo archives to create some other films of vacations, birthdays and other time-lapse events.  The nice thing is that there is no editing – all pictures are treated equally. Hope you enjoy the film – click here for the YouTube link, which can be viewed in HD and is less than 2 minutes long!