Help Needed. Fairly Good Quality Slideshows...

Captain Fertile

Hi all

After messing around with Flash Slideshow Maker I have set myself a project, which I would like to be complete by Christmas next year at the latest.

I would like to create a great slideshow presentation, which I would like to be able to transfer either to CD or DVD so it would be playable on DVD players. I am looking for any software I may need to make a good-looking final product. It doesn't have to be pro standard because it is just for family but a nice standard is desirable.

This will be a gift for family members and will comprise of maybe 200+ pictures and background music. Or as many as I can got on there with the software or disk limits.

I would like titles too but if software is unavailable that can do all of this plus titles I will simply create good titles using Photoshop and add them as images to illustrate the next portion of the slideshow, in fact I may do this anyway because I can’t imagine much software that will provide a good alternative but I may be wrong.

As I have said I would like to be complete by Christmas next year at the latest but if I am done sooner it would also be a good gift for birthdays as well as an important record of our family for us and our kids

As a side note – something which would be very nice but not essential is maybe if I could make a number of shorter, more bite-sized slideshows and create a professional looking menu for people to choose from. I am guessing that with this option it would probably have to be DVD standard to do this but if this is so then it would be fine by me.

Is it also possible to add home movies I have saved as .avi files to the slideshows???? This too would be the icing on the cake – the slideshow with music is the most important part.

I will be scanning and preparing the photographs in the next month or so so I am ready to get cracking ASAP.

Any tips, pointers, suggestions or recommendations of techniques and software you guys can offer will be welcome as always.

If you need more info to help please don't hesitate to ask.

Awaitng any help offered
The Captain
Very Happy

Magicman

You could use photostory to quickly and easily create a nice looking slide show especially for a free program. It only exports in .wmv format but you could find some other program to convert it and burn to DVD.

*EDIT: If you don't mind spending some money, Vegas Studio is a good program for putting everything together and burning it onto DVD.

Released0

Hey, I'm kinda new to FriHost just incase anyone wanted to know Very Happy

Ok well I'm still in secondary school, and for one of my assignments our group chose to make a video presentation. For this presentation we used the buit in Windows Movie Maker program. Also from my experience in using this program, it is very easy to add photos in a slideshow arrangment with some pretty awesome transitions from each one to the next, you can also add captions and background music. On top of al this, if you want to you can add in any AVI files to the sequence, and when you are done with all this you can simply burn it off to DVD or CD, depending on how large the file is!

Hope I could help ya!

jwellsy

Try http://www.slide.com

dvanex

Adobe encore is a great program for making DVD slideshows. It costs quite a bit of money though. I'm not sure if you know but you can't make a DVD slideshow with flash. Encore is frustrating at first but once you get the hang of it (it took me maybe a week, I do graphic design as a hobby though) it’s a very powerful DVD creation tool. You should also have Photoshop to use for a better workflow with it.

ehab

I use Camtasia Studio for making presentations for clients.

It can use SlideShows from Powerpoint n make them into videos. It also has a built in audio editor n normalized + hiss removal , etc.

give it a google !

budazz

photostory is a pretty good program..... just import all your images.. and favorite music....you can enjoy your picture slide show.........

Captain Fertile

Hi all

Thank you all for your suggestions and I checked them all out. In the end I went with a program I found on the web that ticked all the right boxes and did just what I wanted it to do.

I think my lack of good description of what I required rather than any failings in your suggestions on your part made me go with another piece of software, so please don’t think I didn’t bother to check out your suggestion – I looked at them all.

I went with Ulead DVD Pictureshow. It is quick and fairly easy to learn with me working on my first slideshow within ten minutes.

The software also allows me to save any finished movie files I have to disk along with slideshows.

The only drawback I see is that I don’t seem to be able to fast forward to a specific position in a slideshow preview to check that the music is in good synch with the pictures or to work out where one music track ends without viewing the entire slideshow up until that point. This can be a pain with even short slideshows and is a bit of a nightmare for longer slideshows.

I am still learning and have found no drawbacks that will make me wish to change my choice.

The software allows me to create VCD, SVCD and DVD. Now apart from the various file sizes can anyone tell me the difference between VCD and SVCD. Am I right in thinking that SVCD produces better quality output than VCD?

I say this because it seems to offer the same features as a VCD but uses slightly more disk space, other than this I see no difference.

DVD is the way I plan to go in the end with a huge difference in the amount of space available on the disk.

Thanks again for all your help my friends.