zonker wrote:
Can anyone recommend a good program to turn my pictures into slideshow on DvD. I see a ton of the programs out there and jsut looking to see if anyone has used one and is happy with the results.
I have tried several which allow panning and zooming. The best results in terms of output quality have been obtained with ProShow Gold. In order to prevent a shimmering effect when zooming and downsizing to a lower resolution, these programs need to blur the pictures somewhat. Simply put, ProShow seems to blur it less. I like the interface to PhototoMovie, but found the blurring unacceptable (Windows). Also, I don’t believe that P2M for Windows offers DVD authoring at the present time. I liked P2M (and did pay the man) until I saw ProShow output. I have also tried the MOTV application a couple of times over the years and found it lacking. All these programs offer free trials.
Photoshop Elements offers some slideshow capabilities, but I don’t have the latest version. Adobe offers a tryout for that, too. The Photoshop Elements 3 slideshow wizard immediately crashes the application on my Win2k Athlon XP system, which is not otherwise prone to crashing. Adobe seems willing to accept a number of flaws in its consumer level software and I have not been compelled to upgrade.
Then there are the actual video editing applications. Depending upon what exact capabilities you require, i.e, panning, zooming, transitions, and how much you want the program to do and how much you are willing to do yourself, you might look at Sony’s Vegas Movie Studio and Ulead’s VideoFactory 10. I have not tried Adobe’s Premiere Elements as it requires XP and SSE2. I would definitely start with the ProShow Gold trial, though.
