Give a girl a transition

April 4, 2010 9:56 AM

I need help producing a very high quality slideshow.

I've been using Aperture for my photo work and I love it for that. The packaged slideshows are also nice, but there is nowhere near enough control on compositions and transitions to use it for a professional piece. I've toyed with iMovie over the last couple of days as well as a combination of the two and I'm not feeling the love.

This is for an immediate personal project and hopefully future efforts. I'm willing to pay for the right tools as long as it has continued value for an amateur photographer trying to get the most from her work. The initial project is around 100 images that I need to create a combination of single images, compositions, transitions and audio into a 10 minute production.

(I hope to post the results in the Projects section once I have an acceptable result)

posted by michswiss to Media & Arts (6 answers total)

Have you looked at Sounslides? The maunal says it supports Crossfades, Fade out/Fade in, and Straight cuts (they have example clips on their site), of durations between 0.1 and 9.9 seconds. You can also set in-point times for images to within a tenth of a second.
posted by James Scott-Brown at 10:54 AM on April 4, 2010

I mean, of course, the manual.
posted by James Scott-Brown at 10:55 AM on April 4, 2010

You also might have luck using Keynote?
posted by CharlesV42 at 11:36 AM on April 4, 2010

Nthing Soundslides. There is a free version, and the paid version is well worth having.
posted by jgirl at 11:46 AM on April 4, 2010

Photo to Movie works great, is fairly simple, lots of control. But for real power plus ease of use I'd go for Final Cut Express; maybe a used copy? Obviously, the software is very deep and might be considered overkill just for slide shows, but once you get it going, the intuitive timeline and the ability to drag-adjust clip lengths, stack layers (audio, too), animate dimensions and positions, add endless transitions and effects and gorgeous type, plus tons of keyboard shortcuts, make all the purpose-built slideshow apps feel quite rinky-dink and quite a bit slower and less precise for making stuff. You can learn your way around it with a few hours of video tutorials at Lynda.com, and you'll be learning skills with a tool that'll be worth more to you in the long run than learning a slide-show app. There's also a free slideshow plug-in for FCE here.
posted by dpcoffin at 12:45 PM on April 4, 2010

Check these Aperture to Final Cut links out if Final Cut Ex. sounds good to you.
posted by dpcoffin at 1:15 PM on April 4, 2010