I had the honor of attending the retirement ceremony for my neighbor, LCDR Michael J Kraft, who was ending his career with the United States Navy after more than 29 years of honorable service. The ceremony was incredible, with emotions running high for all in attendance. Mike has been a great neighbor these last 5 years, and it was my honor to have been invited to the retirement ceremony. I would like to personally thank him for his many years of service to our wonderful country.
I wasn’t attending the ceremony professionally, yet still managed to get many wonderful photographs from the event. Once I returned home from the ceremony, I began post processing and weeding through all the photographs in order to put together a tribute video for Mike. I’ve been using Aperture 3 since the first beta, and this was the first chance I had to use the new slideshow features. Like most of Apple’s products, the slideshow interface was nicely integrated into Aperture, along with iTunes, and within minutes I had the basics of the slideshow setup. After about an hour I had created a nice intro page, set the slideshow to music, and found the exact transition timing to coincide with the chosen music.
At this point I began to research how I was going to get this slideshow into DVD format for my neighbor’s retirement party in the evening. Several google searches later, I figured out the basic workflow: Aperture 3 Slideshow -> Export -> HD 720p -> iDVD import -> Burn
The most difficult part of the entire exercise was waiting for the 5 minute slideshow to export (took about 30 minutes), along the 2nd and 3rd exports after finding multiple mistakes (I was tired!!). Once exported, I created a simple iDVD project, imported the slideshow (drag and drop), and voila, the iDVD project was ready to burn. The whole process took a few hours, but could have been compressed without my initial slideshow errors (spelling and grammar).
The end results was an incredible video, which touched the hearts of all those who attended the celebration. The video can be viewed here. Below you will find the photographs I was most pleased with:

























































