Make a DVD to play at 1 frame per minute?
DVD players will need to either play it at 30 (NTSC) or 25 (PAL) frames per second. If you want to be able to play your work on ANY DVD player (and not just computers and a few high spec’d machines), then this is probably the only way to achieve it (I note it was your preferred option in the question). Using any video editing software (final cut, iMovie, premiere, et al) should allow you to duplicate the frame to fit the timeline in order to make an actual video file out of your stills. Obviously there is a bit of copying and pasting involved, but once you lay down a few images, copying them as they grow each time should make the process relatively easy. In FCP you can ‘freeze frame’ the image and then sustain it for as long as you need to – but this may not be the case for cheaper/consumer level NLEs. You’ll need to determine the standard prior to doing this – NTSC (720×480) or PAL (720×576) – and size your images accordingly, so that your edit doesn’t require (too much) rendering. Do
You can sort of slow down DVD video to any desired frame rate, but it’s not for the feint-hearted. DVD still slideshows are part of the DVD standard. Basically a video file is created completely composed of I-frames, with each frame being a new still image, and playback of each frame can be controlled fairly accurately. However, support beyond the a basic level is very spotty amongst players. Offhand, though, I don’t know of any authoring app which does this properly – you’d probably have to do it directly in the virtual machine code. And as I said, it’s almost unsupported except to the extent necessary for a few stills for menus, etc. Also, I think you’re limited to 99 stills in the chain, though I could be wrong – it might be 99 PGCs in 99 VTSs. A rough unthinking guess suggests ~216000 frames, 1 per minute = 216000 minutes, or 150 days – but I’d suspect you’d overflow the available counters / registers long before that… It’d be an interesting exercise to try if you were happy hand
If you don’t have to use any DVD player or a specific DVD player you might pick up one of the $40 models at a local big box that also play back mpeg/divx type files. If you find one that will do that then you can probably make a movie file that is 10 hours long without any great difficulty, given that each minute is really just one frame image. Any decent compression algo should give you a pretty small file, considering. If that is unacceptable then you likely need something that will let you make more complicated DVD menus than normal. Since I have seen commercial DVDs that will do something different after repeating a certain amount of times I suspect you can create a menu that replays a 1 second movie 60 times, then moves to a different menu page and does the same thing again, with a different movie. If that isn’t notably automated then you are looking at doing that 60*60*12 times, but I don’t k
This page shows you how to use VCDEasy (fairly inexpensive commercial program) to make a VCD with up to 1980 DVD quality pictures with a user defined pause between them. This should cover you for 24 hours with a minute between pictures. You might be able to find different (e.g. free) software but the point is that the VideoCD format is explicitly designed to support still pictures but all the DVD slideshow software seems to work by padding the time with extra frames.
