Professional slideshow software

October 25, 2007 9:41 AM

Looking for high end slide show software. I am putting together a slide show of family pictures and have been approached by others to put together slide shows for them as well. I am proficient in Photoshop and Illustrator and enjoy the challenges and rewards that using them brings.

I used Pro Show gold and was not dissatisfied with the results, but I own the Adobe Master Suite which includes Premier and was wondering if it was possible to use that to make a slide show from photos. I am working on a PC and would like something equivlant to Final Cut Pro on the mac. Does anything exist in the PC world?

posted by aisleofview to media & arts (5 comments total)

I'm not sure how much work you actually want to put into making custom slideshows, but since you mentioned a general purpose editing app like FCP, allow me to wholeheartedly recommend Adobe After Effects as your tool of choice for this task.

It's not a "load in a folder of images, and press the 'Make Slideshow' button" kind of app, but it's the defacto standard program for doing high end "slideshow" types of presentations. Most of the film The Kid Stays In the Picture was created in After Effects.

It allows you to animate a virtual 3d camera around your images, complete with 3d lighting, shadows, etc. And the rendering quality is second to none.

It's got a relatively high learning curve, but if you know how to accomplish similar tasks in FCP, After Effects wont be a problem for you, and will probably be a welcome change, considering how bad of a job FCP does with animating and rendering still images.
posted by melorama at 9:50 AM on October 25, 2007

thanks melorama, I'll give it a whirl...any suggestions on some tutorials or books on how to begin?
posted by aisleofview at 11:39 AM on October 25, 2007

Weird, just last nite I finished a slideshow in Premiere CS2 and found this tutorial extremely helpful for importing photos in a batch.
This will show you how to do the import-a-folder-of-images-and-make-a-slideshow.

Then you can use these adobe help files to add custom motion (panning, zooming, rotating, etc...) to the show. The Video motion control, for me, was not the most intuitive thing to get the hang of, but once I did I was off to the races. People sometimes call this the "Ken Burns" effect.

Then you can use the ripple edit tool to match the photo transitions with the tempo of the music.
posted by chocolate_butch at 1:17 PM on October 25, 2007

aisleofviewPoster: "thanks melorama, I'll give it a whirl...any suggestions on some tutorials or books on how to begin?"


Check my response to this recent AskMe thread for some good resources.

Also, this older thread.
posted by melorama at 7:04 PM on October 25, 2007

No doubt that AE is the pro tool for this stuff in many cases, but here’s an alternate approach that might be a bit more efficient if you aren’t needing all the 3D effects that AE provides (and aren’t going to be doing all that TKSITPicture layer-creating stuff in PS:

PhotoToMovie

Here’s a quote from a posting I found very helpful in a long (tedious) thread about stills in video over in the FinalCut Forums at Apple Discussions:

"About 70% of all of my company's projects (maybe 50 a year) involve films wholly or partly comprised of stills...hence our name. We do a ton of museum/documentary work. Here's my take on this (and hopefully some simple advice for the original poster)...

First, we never use FCP or Motion to "animate" stills...too many potential problems and it takes too dang much time screwing around with the variables.

We use proprietary still animation software but we have found that software like Photo to Movie is darn near as good, so we'll use that as an example for our workflow. (No we aren't on the take from whoever makes that brand)

The process is a snap.

First, we scan in all of the photos (let's say for a museum exhibit support film or tightly scripted documentary sequence).

We gang scan them at 400 dpi because, well, that looks just fine. Any bigger than that for SD (or even HD broadcast or DVD) is a waste of time...Particularly historical photos. Believe me, we have tested that contention thoroughly.

Second, we clean the shots up in Photoshop and, this is VERY important, we punch in about 1-2% gaussian blur. That takes out about 99.9% of the pixel flutter out when you do your animation.

Next we import the shots into the software (again like Photo to Movie) and do our animation (keyframed pans, pushes, tilt/boom ups, compound moves, whatever). We actually do a number of "camera moves" for each shot so we have editing flexibility...a number of different takes so to speak. It's really easy in the software...drag and drop beginning and end frames.

Finally we export out of the software (now a series of animated stills as QT video) in SD or HD format and dimensions and import it into FCP for editing just like any other piece of film. We apply our transitions, filters, whatever just like any film project. No muss no fuss...and broadcast quality.

We have done work for national destination museums and network broadcast work down to individual family films. It looks great and can be done in half the time of screwing around doing it in FCP."

I do this kind of thing professionally also (on a tiny, not-for-TV-or-Hollywood scale) and I’ve bought and/or tried out most of the Ken-Burns-Effect software for the Mac, and find PhotoToMovie to be the most useful/powerful/cost-effective; plus it’s cross platform...
posted by dpcoffin at 1:24 PM on October 26, 2007