Digital Photographer's Software Guide - Bertemes - Net

27
Slide Show Creation
What passes for slide show creation in most image viewers and editors is little more than
the automatic cycling of images with a brief dissolve in between them. This may be
acceptable on some occasions, but it is scarcely the kind of show we remember from the
great days of audio/visual presentation using real slides on computer-controlled banks
of Kodak Carousel projectors. Even in the Victorian era, traveling showmen put on great
entertainment with magic lanterns that took slides with moveable picture elements. The
visual effects they created were more complex than those in the first edition of Adobe
Lightroom’s slide show module. Did you ever see the one of a man swallowing a rat?
Specialized slide show software goes a long way beyond what is offered in standard image
editors. For a start, it needs to accommodate a synchronized soundtrack, the one element
that is most likely to create a memorable experience, apart from the images themselves.
Second, it needs to have the ability to pan and zoom the images and record these
effects for automatic playback. Plenty of transition effects is a given—and here some
developers go way over the top in providing visually irritating transitions along with the
good ones. Finally, it needs to have an interface that makes it easy for you to organize
images and set timings, and synchronize transitions to the soundtrack. Surprisingly, very
few software packages meet these criteria.
Unlike some of the other categories in this book, the slide show software listed in this
chapter is a rag-bag collection of packages with very different personalities. They range
from the no-nonsense Soundslides, favored by journalists, right up to ProShow Producer
for making professional shows. In a determined effort to mix media as much as possible,
Slideroll lets you create a slide show online, download it as a QuickTime movie,
and then email it to your friends. If it can be done, you know there is a developer out
there who will attempt to do it.