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October 26, 2005 Great Slide Shows Made Easy It’s now easier than ever to create elegant, exciting, poignant or just plain fun slide shows from your digital photos and video clips. We’ve recently tried two slide show programs, and here’s what we found:
To create your show, you first fill the Media Pool with your desired pictures, which can come from your hard drive or directly from a scanner or digital camera. Then add other items such as scanned pictures of invitations, birthday cards and such. Thumbnails of the photos are shown in the Media Pool, and you can drag and drop any or all onto the Storyboard in the order you want. Change your mind about the order? Just drag and drop the photos into the new order, that easy. The included full-featured photo editor, Photo Clinic 4.5, contains sophisticated photo editing features that allow you to add special effects or correct problems such as red-eye, poor color or exposure and more. Changes only affect the slide show photos, and your original files are left unchanged. Assign a length of time for each photo to be shown, and then choose from a host of transitions between slides--anything from simple fades to wild swirly things. Add text to one or more slides, using your choice of fonts, colors and text effects. You control the time that the text appears on screen, and it can bridge several slides. Add music, sound effects or even record narration if you want. A selection of music is included, or you can add your favorite songs. Preview your slide show as you go to make sure it’s what you want. The TimeLine mode shows each element, picture, effect and sound on its own track, where it can be precisely controlled for extra precision in editing. If you prefer, use the Magix Photoshow Maker feature to automatically create your show by using a selection of styles. Burning your completed slide show is pretty easy: just choose the type of burn format you want, such as VCD, SVCD, DVD, mini DVD or CD-ROM, and you have a digital photo album slide show to share with family and friends, or to safeguard your pictures. Or send the show to anyone via e-mail by exporting it as a movie in any one of variety of formats: AVI, MPEG 1 or 2, Real Media, or Microsoft Windows Media 9. Help comes in the form of tool tips, some complete with instructional tutorials, a 32-page printed Quick Start User Manual, online help and a fairly detailed on-disk manual in PDF form.
You can use Preset Themes, complete with appropriate transitions, special effects, introductions and music. Any Theme can be further customized to add different transitions, special effects such as pan and zoom (really cool), multiple audio clips of narrations or your favorite music. The audio can be automatically matched to end when the slide show does and/or trimmed to selected segments. Ample menu creation choices finish the project with a professional look. Your slide show can be burned to a CD or DVD for playback in many DVD players. Dual-layer DVD is supported for doubling disc capacity, and the original pictures can be archived along with the slide show on the same disc. The user interface is simple, but help is available from tool tips, on-line help and 65-page User’s Guide that includes a very helpful explanation of each on-screen command. Either of these programs makes it easy to create memorable slide shows. PictureShow4 has a little simpler interface, making it somewhat easier to use, but PhotoStory4 and its Timeline mode offers more intuitive and precise editing.
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PhotoStory on CD & DVD 4
(Magix, Windows 98SE/Me/2000/XP with Pentium II, $39.99) lets you use your
digital photos and/or video clips to create slide shows and then add text,
narration, sound effects and music. The photo slide show can also be used as a
digital album for sharing or for archiving your pictures for safekeeping. And
there are business uses too, such as for training or demonstrating new products
or services. You can burn the slide show onto a CD or DVD that will play back on
most newer DVD players or on the CD-ROM or DVD drive on your computer.
CD
& DVD PictureShow 4 (Ulead,
Windows 98SE/Me/2000/XP with Pentium 4, 1.3 Ghz, $49.99) requires you to have
photos in a folder ahead of time and then displays them as thumbnails. You
choose the size of the thumbnail, and the first slide in your series becomes the
thumbnail to identify the set in the Slideshow List. You’ll be able to
add or delete pictures from the set as desired, re-arrange the pictures in the
order you want, decorate any photos with clip art and add text. Then apply photo
corrections to fix common problems such as exposure, color or red eye using the
built-in ExpressFix feature. Segments from your favorite videos can be
inserted into your slide show to add interest or as an introductory video before
the start of the slides.