Photo Montage Software
 

I'm currently using Photo to Movie (Mac) as my quick and easy photo montage sotware, but I'm getting bored with it. What are you guys using and can you specify if it's for Mac or PC?

for basic, I use Sony Vegas, for more advance After effect.

Automatic Photo Montage Software
 

Ethan - do you mean _automatic_ photo montage software? I'd like better automatic pm software too, either mac or PC.
I use either the iTunes/iPhoto workflow for quick-and-simply slideshows that i don't care that much about but Final Cut Pro for those that i do.
iPhoto does an adequate job of fitting a bunch of photos to music provided the photos are approximately the same aspect ratio as the video frame (otherwise the automatic Ken Burns effect may go nutty) and the music is trimmed to the desired duration prior to placing it in iTunes. Big downside is that slide-slide transitions are not synched to the music's rhythm.
An edit (e.g., FCP or After Effects) permits exact synching, more appropriate and elaborate motion and multiple takes of the same photo, and multiple photos for starters but takes time to do, - eric

Oddly enough, I discovered that Toast on my Mac came with a fairly decent photo montage maker. Haven't used it in awhile but IIRC, it was fairly flexible and easy to use.

Not to mention, you get a nice DVD burning program as a bonus!

Thanks for the responses guys. I was talking about automatic software or maybe even templates for AE. I don't have the time to sit down and manually piece one together nor do we charge enough for one to warrant that kind of attention.

If you don't mind spending some money, Animoto (animoto.com) is an option. It makes killer slideshows and is very quick and simple.

Depending, of course, on how much time you are willing to invest into creating your own slideshow templates.

I don't know if Canopus Imaginate is still available--it does manual and automatic. for PC.

Imaginate is still available, but I don't think it has been updated. The version I used exported the final project into some format that was difficult to import. I think it was an .avi, but I always had problems with them. It was an awesome program and you can keyframe the heck out of stuff.
Lately I have been using FotoMagico (Boinx Software - FotoMagico - Overview) and really like it. We haven't been doing as many montages (fine by me) as we have in the past.
HTH

I've been using Vegas + the VASST plug-in. But I'd love to hear the Mac side recommendations. Haven't found anything on the Mac side yet that's as quick & flexible, barring messing around in AE / Motion.

Oh man.......

I'm going nuts with this....My slideshows are killing me on time..

Perhaps an After Effects bundle, that allowed for placeholders, and simply insert your photos...
I would definately buy into something like that..Animoto looks good to, but at least project files in AE would allow you to customize some things, and allow for total control...

I wonder if Andrew Kramer at VideoCopilot has such an offering??

Encore CS3 does a pretty good job too and you can have it fit to the music. You can specify transition and let it randomly pick the panning, zooming, etc. I will usually let it fit the selections to music and adjust the last two pictures manually to get the song to end the way I want. I also use a black image to dissolve into the beginning and out at the ending of the slideshow. It is pretty simple and does a fair job.

I use Premiere Pro for ones I want more control over.

No version for Mac, but for PC there's ProShow Producer from Photodex. (Photodex ProShow - HD Slide Shows for TV, DVD, PC and Web)

This is a fantastic program IMO. Check it out if you're PC user.

Jeff

For 'lazy' stuff, I use Encore CS3, people are generally pretty happy with the results. For jobs that are a focal point of the project and require more care/precision, I do it in Premiere or AE (depending on the amount of text animation needed, but I prefer Premiere if it'll work for the job).

Basically the same as what Janice said above.

Chris H. and I saw their booth at WEVA last year. Interesting program. A couple of the booth employees were from Texas so we ended up staying and chatting for a bit.

-gb-

Don't waste your money on this program, it is great if you go straight to dvd or BD, but if you need to incorporated it into your current NLE, it is almost imposible, you can not render out to Canopus HQAVI or DV AVI, the last 30 seconds has black for video and pink noise for audio, you can not render out to any other type of AVI either, like uncompressed AVI or cinepak ( it want to take 10 hrs. to do a 3 minutes show), tech support was able to duplicated the problem but suggested that I should shut down extraneous software running on machine, the way I look at it is if they were able to duplicated the problem then it is not my machine and they should try to fix it, my fault for not trying to render out a full show, I only did a short one and it works so I bought it but I would not recommend this program for this kind of support.