Slide show with audio, transitions, zoom/pan

[Terry]

Sorry for yet another request for a slide show program, but I have not
found a good application yet.

I want to create slide shows with:

- Adjustable timing between slides.

- Audio in the background. Ideally, ability to easily sync the audio
to specific slides.

- Transitions between slides. The more choices the better, but at
least a few basic things like fade (disolve), slide left and right,
etc.

- Ability to zoom and pan across a slide (and perhaps rotate, as
well). This lets you provide "motion" in the show, and pan across a
high resolution panorama, etc.

- I do not want to create video files. I want to see these at the full
resolution of my monitor (1600x1200). The ability to create video
would be nice to have, but that should not be the only output option.

- Works with a system with dual monitors. It doesn't have to show the
slides across both monitors, in fact I don't want it to. But some
slide shows are confused by the dual monitor setup, and show only half
the slide on the left monitor.

- Good navigation during the show. You should be able to pause, move
back and forth between slides, go to a specific slide, show the
filename of the slide, turn on and off caption or other descriptive
information.

- The ability to import a list of slides from a file (csv, xml, a
database, whatever). I want to choose the slides and order them in
another program, export the list of filenames, and then import them
into the slide show program.

I have tried a number of freeware programs, including myalbum, and
looked at the web pages for a whole lot more. I haven't found anything
that comes close to the above. I have even tried a couple of payware
programs -- the best was ProShowGold, but even that failed on the last
two items.

I'm beginning to suspect that I'm looking for the unavailable, but I
would love it if someone came up with a good solution.

Thanks,

Terry

 

[Terry]

Add another requested feature:

- Ability to rotate the picture when shown, without modifying the
original file.

Terry

 

[PerthMETRO.net]

Add another requested feature:

- Ability to rotate the picture when shown, without modifying the
original file.

Terry

? Slide Show Movie Maker

 

[Terry]

? Slide Show Movie Maker

This is (I believe) video output only. I haven't tried any of these
programs yet, but is it possible to create high resolution slide
shows? Can I produce a 1600x1200 (for example) video? And play it back
smoothly? If I can, won't the resulting file be huge? (Actually, it
looks like SSM is limited to 2GB video files).

Terry

 

[Terry]

This is (I believe) video output only. I haven't tried any of these
programs yet, but is it possible to create high resolution slide
shows? Can I produce a 1600x1200 (for example) video? And play it back
smoothly? If I can, won't the resulting file be huge? (Actually, it
looks like SSM is limited to 2GB video files).

OK, I tried this out. It's a nice program for producing video from
slides, if that's what you want to do. And you can produce 1600x1200
video files. But a sample show I built at that resolution, with 4
slides, 1 slide with a panning action, total 33 seconds long, took 24
minutes to build, and created a 1.8 GB AVI file!

The resulting show did not play correctly in Media Player (which is
the only player I have installed on my test installation where I was
doing this). And the details in the images were still blurred
(compression artifacts? Resizing?)

At a more reasonable 640x480, the build times were still long, about
30 to 60 seconds per slide, but that's still quite a wait for a large
slide show with 100's of images. And of course the image quality was
poor if you tried to view it full screen.

I don't think the video output programs are going to cut it.

Terry

 

[Onno]

Add another requested feature:

- Ability to rotate the picture when shown, without modifying the
original file.

In MyAlbum (and probably other album software too) you can set up Irfanview
as the external editor. Just press Ctrl+Enter and Irfanview opens the file
for you. R is for rotating.

For the other stuff, see my reply in rec.photo.digital.

 

[Terry]

In MyAlbum (and probably other album software too) you can set up Irfanview
as the external editor. Just press Ctrl+Enter and Irfanview opens the file
for you. R is for rotating.

Sure, but Irfanview will modify the original file (or you'll have to
create another copy). So you don't need Irfanview, MyAlbum can do this
all by itself. Actually, Myalbum creates a copy, renames the origianl
with a slightly modified filename, and renames the copy to the
original file name.

Some slide show programs, in contrast, allow you to rotate the image
as displayed, but the original file is never modified or copied. It's
not a huge deal, but it is a nice feature.

Terry

 

[Onno]

Sure, but Irfanview will modify the original file (or you'll have to
create another copy)

As long as you don't save the file, Irfanview will not modify it.
Just try it, open a picture with Irfanview and press R.Then close it and
open it again.