Making Slideshows
 

Hey guys, does anyone out there have a favortie software program for doing slideshows? Right now we just use final cut and imovie but I'm looking for one of those programs that has creative backgrounds and puts them in picture frames or whatever? I've seen a few out there but haven't taken the time to find out what they were... I've seen the digital juice suff... but anyway, any ideas would be great...

Eric Hansen

It's not what your looknig for, but phototomovie for mac is invaluable software for our slideshows. It lets you add the motion, add curves to the motion paths and change the transitions between photos in a very quick and easy interface. It also lets you export one slideshow while working on another, which can be great if you edit in segments. Overall, we use it to cut down on a lot of time that it would have taken to do the same thing in Final Cut.

Adobe Encore DVD 2.0 has made it really easy to do slide shows, and it works very nicely with PhotoShop and AfterEffects - highly reccomend Encore for both DVD authoring and Slideshow design - much better than there older versions.

Ryan

It's not available for the mac, but I found Canopus' Imaginate to be really easy and pretty quick to use:

http://www.canopus.com/products/Imaginate/index.php

Regards,
-Michael

More info
 

Patrick
Who makes this program, phototomovie for mac? Where may I find info on it?
Thank you

Here it is:

http://lqgraphics.com/phototomovie.php

Here is a quicktime sample of a love story we did in which phototomovie was used for most of the motion in the pictures (especially the slideshow playing in the background of the interview). We export the slideshow from phototomovie into FCP and it is much quicker and very easy to do nice curves.

http://www.smcouples.com/Precious.html


Patrick

The Ultimate-S script for Vegas does many things, but among them is the best slideshow automation I've ever seen.

What takes me forever is scanning and photo-shopping all those pictures.

Patrick that was awesome. What you have created was grand. I am sure the couple loved it even more. Good Job! TAG

The mother of the bride now actually works for us unofficially in promoting our company because she was just so struck by the whole thing. It went over extremely well, but in all honesty, I don't think that says too much about the work as many people are impressed by the simplest of slideshows...

Thanks for the comment though.

less is more!
 

Patrick, I thought the simplicity of the slideshow was one of the big reasons I liked it. That, and the fact that the couple were both very endearing in relating their love story. Very clean. Way to go...was it a glide/steadicam you were using for those smooth shots?

Yeah, I'm liking the simply but clean slideshow look as well. We clean all the images up in photoshop but I have gotten out of the fake photo frames, and animating the background at a different speed than the subject.

As for the motion shots, it was actually my first time out with our body mounted stabilizer (magiqcam). I actually just finished up a highlights for another couple that was shot mostly with the body mounted stabilizer and it is a fairly large difference, in my opinion over our older work where I used a hand held glidecam like stabilizer.