Ram & Reason: Polished Gold: Photodex ProShow Gold 2.6

        By Rob Rice   March 2006

      Forget about groundhogs, the best test of an early spring in Alaska is sighting a tour bus making its practice runs around the sights. I love taking photographs and living in Alaska means I take LOTS of photographs, especially in spring. Needing someway to preserve and display them, a couple of months ago, I set off to find a good DVD photo slide show program. There are numerous good CD burning slide shows available and many for free, but I wanted the quality of a DVD. So I set off to see what I could find. Wow! There are lots of them, some expensive, some basic, some complicated. Some were loaded with features; some were middle of the road. But in case you are wondering, I did not find any that were free. That is not to say there is free software out there; it’s just that I did not find it. Yet, the one thing that I did find with many was that they were either unstable or too basic.

      Armed with 248 photos and 5 songs to accompany the photos, I tried to compose and burn the compilation to a DVD. The systems that I used were 1.5 GHZ computers with a gigahertz of RAM. The operating systems were Windows 2000 and Windows XP. The DVD would be about 23 minutes long with each slide displaying about 10 to 11 seconds. Of the products that I tested two stood out from the pack; the free Microsoft Photo Story 3 and the $69.95 Photodex ProShow Gold 2.6. Both were intuitive enough to get a basic disc burned, both were stable and both were flexible enough so that a respectable disk could be produced.

      So which one is tops, Photo Story 3 or ProShow Gold? Well, Microsoft Photo Story 3 is only free if you already have Windows XP and the $19 Sonic Solutions plugin to burn DVDs; otherwise you are limited to SVCDs (Super Video CD). The SVCD is in its own right the best of the CD burning formats but it cannot out do the DVD for picture clarity and capacity. In the end, the answer was easy, Photodex ProShow Gold 2 .6 wins.

      The problems that I encountered most with the programs that I tried were instability and a lack of flexibility.

Stability

      As I mentioned earlier, I took 248 photos and 5 songs to accompany the photos and tried to compose and burn the compilation. That is a lot of pictures, but the total running time was only just over twenty minutes. Almost all of the programs that I tried simply froze. Some threw errors or mysteriously lost photos when I tried to manipulate them; however, ProShow Gold didn’t seem to care if I threw 3 photos or 300 photos at it, it performed without a hitch and burned the DVD every time.

Flexibility

      One of the features that many of the programs are promoting is the ability to have the view of the slide move from one corner or another, creating a type of panning effect that is common to TV documentaries. This is a nice touch, except that some programs did it by default to every slide and would not allow you to turn it off, which after a while got darn right nauseous! ProShow Gold allows for the manipulation of the panning effect as well as the ability to turn it off or on for each slide.

      One of the programs had a bad habit of running your slides off of the edge of the screen. ProShow Gold has a nice feature, the “Aspect Ratio Safe Zone” which shows you the edge of your screen so that you can make adjustments and thus avoiding any surprises, but I have yet to need it as the default settings are just fine.

      Screen captions can be set with a multitude of colored exploding, fading, sliding, or just plain text.

      ProShow Gold has four viewing areas when you open it. At the upper left is the Folders List, which shows you the folders on your hard drive. Below it is the Files List, showing you the files within the hard drive’s folders. Below the Files List and running along the bottom is the Slide List which has the slides you are working on laid out in a timeline format. And finally in the upper right is the largest viewing area the Preview Window. This is topped off by a colorful and intuitive toolbar.

Too begin creating your slide show, simply navigate in the Folders List to where your pictures and video clips are and click on the desired folder. In the Files List you see the names of the files, click on these to see that picture or video clip appear in the preview Window. Finally just drag and drop the photo or clip onto the Side List. Slides and videos can be shuffled around to an order that you want with drag and drop motion. Once you have your photos and video clips in the order that you want, music can be added by the same method of drag and drop as the photos. A big label saying, “Soundtrack . . . Drop background songs here” takes the mystery of where to drag and drop your songs. Once this is done the order of the songs can be changed by the drag and drop method. The timing and slide transitions can be easily changed and edited with a multitude of special effects . . . or just left as is.

     Finally click the appropriate icon on the toolbar to create either a DVD disk for a home DVD player, a video CD, a video, an executable that can be opened and played on a computer, a self starting CD for the computer, or even a screen saver - one of my favorite options. You can even email your creation right from ProShow Gold or share it with a friend. A show for your web page can also be created; the terrific Help file shows you how to put the show on the page. Options also allow you to limit the time that a person can view the show and to add a password.

      While the process is pretty much straight forward, what I really like about ProShow Gold is that you really can grow into it. At first glance it does not look like a program with a lot of flexibility or options, but a right click menu shows otherwise. The helpful menus along the creation process create an easy learning curve and introduce even more flexibility into the process without dumping it on you all at once.

Conclusion

     The bottom line; I was able to compose, edit and burn a DVD with music in under an hour that played on my home DVD player without touching the manual (Help file). Also, just as important, the quality was exactly what I expected from a DVD and without any aggravating moments such as skipping music, crashing, pictures or captions off the edge of the screen, etc. There was only one irritation in the final result and that was the Photodex animated logo automatically placed at the beginning of my show. Finally reading the Help file revealed that by unchecking a little box titled “Include Intro Show” the animated logo went away. Given how good this program works, my irritation very quickly subsided. And, believe it or not, if you should run into problems Photodex has a 1-800 number that you can call for help. Not too many software companies do that anymore!

      Photodex got it right. ProShow Gold 2.6 is worthy of the praise that it gets in the press and on the Web. The program has all of the bells and whistles that most folks would want and it is still an easy and fun program to learn. You can tell when people who write software have taken the time and listened to their customers. This is not a hurried product that was shoved out the door and is beta tested by the customers. It is a polished and mature product that has finally ended my search for a quality photo slide show.

      Below is a list of ProShow Gold features from the Photodex website (http://www.photodex.com).  A version for professionals is also available called ProShow Producer. Free, thirty day trial versions are available from the Photodex website.

Rob Rice is a computer specialist working in Anchorage, Alaska. Rob can be reached at articles@ISP.com

From the Photodex website:

Easily Add Content and Customize Slides

Easily drag and drop content into a show

Use photos, video clips, and music

Visually trim and edit video clips

Support for over 100 file types

Set custom timing for each slide

Easily modify many slides at once

Transparency support for PSD, PNG, TIFF and GIF

Use linear slide list or 2D light box for sorting

One-click auto-correct for your photos

Motion Effects and Transitions

Ken Burns style motion effects with pan and zoom

Over 280 quality transitions

Control timing for each transition

Pan photos, including panoramic

Zoom photos to any size

Rotate photos to any angle

Options composition lines for perfect alignment

Precise control over motion

Set start time for motion on slides

Set acceleration styles for panning

Music and Sounds

Control volume of audio

Crop and fade in and out of audio

View sound wave form of audio

Add sounds to any individual slide

Import music from any audio CD

Automatically time your slides and music

Record voice-overs

Enhanced Workflow

Unlimited Undo and Redo

Preview real-time as you work, full screen

Automatic show backup and recovery keeps work safe

Collect show files to any folder, CD or DVD for archiving

Fully integrated tools minimize back and forth between programs

Superior Output

Dual layer drive and media support

Enhanced menuing for DVDs and PC playback

Highest speed, highest quality video creation

Include multiple shows on one disc or executable

Add your own custom introduction show

Set title and thumbnail for each show used in menus

Combine both TV and PC playback on one disc.

Fastest video rendering time in the industry

Enhanced Menuing and Authoring System

Fully integrated DVD authoring

Fully customizable menus

Output to CD in a variety of formats

Create both VCD still shows and VCD video shows

Burn multiple copies of DVDs and VCDs

Anti-flicker filtering reduces flickering of video output

Supports NTSC and PAL standards

Share Shows Online

Create online shows

Publish streaming shows to a website

Easily integrates into any website with little HTML

ProShow web format provides better quality than Flash

Share shows for free at Photodex.com

Video File Creation

Create standard MPEG 1 and MPEG 2 video files

Control video format and rendering options

Use ProShow videos in other applications

Executables for PC Playback

Build fully self-contained slide show executables

PC executables include familiar DVD-style menus

No additional software required for playback

Auto-Play CD Creation

Create auto-play CDs

Play a show on any PC with no installation

Fully integrated creation and burning

        Rob Rice is a computer specialist working in Anchorage, Alaska. Rob can be contacted at articles@isp.com