April 20, 2009

ProShow Gold 4.0 (**** out of four) is the newest and best yet version of a full-featured program that makes it quick and easy to create a slide show from your digital photographs, scanned pictures and video clips. The program offers a great way to share photos of trips, special events and the like and for businesses to showcase products or services, make training or instruction manuals and more.

This newest version of our favorite slide show creator program has added features that extend its capabilities, such as slide styles, unlimited layers of photos or videos and additional photo editing tools. Other new features that make the program easier to use are the ability to quickly toggle between slide list and timeline views and favorite pane views. In addition, the program now supports more than 40 output options for displaying your show on just about any device. These and many other new features make this program stand out.

The program supports more than 100 types of input file formats, and you can create slide shows in a standard 4:3 aspect ratio, wide-screen 16:9 aspect ratio or custom aspect ratios. The shows can also include video and audio clips. Photo editing features include unlimited slide layers for cool creative effects, red-eye removal and non-destructive cropping.

When using the program, you’ll work from four windows. In the first window, the file explorer, you choose the folder that contains the pictures you want in the slide show. A second window shows file names or thumbnails of the pictures in that folder. Select one of the thumbnails, and it’s displayed full size in the third window. Here you can customize the slide by choosing from a variety of slide options, including photo editing to crop or adjust brightness, contrast and hue. Or you can color the entire image to produce special effects, such as black and white, sepia tones and more. For more interest in your slide shows, consider adding motion effects, such as having the picture move in from the top, or rotate into view, zoom in or out and more. If you include video clips in your slide show, you can trim them to frame accuracy to get exactly what you want to show.

You can add captions to an individual slide or for the whole show. The captions can be fixed in position or move in or out, fade in or out, pan, scroll and more. The program includes backgrounds that can be used for any specific slide or for the whole slide show. There is support for transparency effects for PSD, PNG, TIFF and GIF formats, allowing viewers to "see-through" images to see underlying text or backgrounds. Add sounds, narration or music, (such as WAV or MP3 sound files) to each slide, and/or choose a soundtrack for the entire show. The program also supports importing music directly from CDs. You can trim audio clips to just the part you want, complete with fade control. An audio waveform display helps with your editing accuracy.

The fourth window is the slide show window displaying your selected slides in a strip from left to right. Here you can drag and drop the pictures you want in the show in the order you want. It’s easy to insert new pictures, re-order or remove slides. By default, a fade transition is provided between each slide, but you can choose from more than 280 varieties of transitions. The cool transition chooser window shows you exactly how each transition looks between the actual slides. Don’t like the look? Choose another transition or just use the new random transition feature.

The slide show can be saved in a ProShow format or exported as a streaming video MPG I or MPG II movie. ProShow Gold 4.0 will burn your show to DVD or Video CDs, with or without menus. If you choose to include menus, you can customize them with your captions, menu audio clips, menu selection images and backgrounds. Your custom menu can also be saved and used for future projects if you want. This newest version can also save your slide show in Windows Media video, Quicktime video, Flash video, Blu-ray and for the ultimate quality, high definition video for HDTV.

The resulting show you’ve created and burned to DVD can be controlled via the remote for your DVD player. You can also share your slide show by creating it as a Web show for a Web site, attaching it to an e-mail or uploading it directly to your account on YouTube. Other output options include creating an auto run CD for a computer, an executable file version that includes the viewer program on disc or making a screen saver of your show.

New usability features include slide option hotkeys, a timeline list of slides, a "Find Missing Files" utility (now where did I put that picture file?) and a favorites window. Help for the program comes from a 167-page printed user manual, extensive tool tips and online help as well as web site tutorials. ProShow Gold incorporates many features to help you be as creative as you want and to customize your show. Or just use the defaults for a quick and easy "show and tell" slide show.

ProShow Gold is a program we’ve used extensively because of it’s ease of use, versatility and flexibility. We made many friends and family members happy by giving them a slide show remembrance of special events. You can too.