By Larry Anders, Librarian, Tampa PC Users Group
Larry@AndersNet.com

I’ve written a couple of reviews in the past about programs that will take your digital images, either taken with a digital camera, scanned or borrowed from the Internet, and do something special with the images. And those software packages were good, or I wouldn’t have written about them to begin with. But I’ve found one that is better, and quite impressive at that.

ProShow Gold is a program with nine modules to let you create professional-looking slide shows to share with your friends, use for business, or just for fun, I guess. It’s as easy as just selecting your images, drag and drop them onto a show window, add sound in the form of music or a digitally recorded track of commentary and choose from over 280 nicely-done transition effects between slides. You can even mix in a video with the still images.

I just used the phrase “still images”, but with ProShow Gold your images are anything but still. Next time you watch a television ad notice that you hardly ever see just a still image used in a professional commercial. ProShow Gold gives you this ability to add motion effects, such as panning, rotating and zooming [also known as Ken Burns effects, referencing a documentary filmmaker who popularized these effects]. You can make subtle little changes in the image, or call dramatic attention to a portion or spot on the image, and it only takes a few seconds for each shot, or, if you have several images, just let ProShow Gold randomly select your motion effects [and transitions] for you.

Once you’ve chosen the images, transitions, sounds and motion effects you can create a show title screen with menus if you have more than one slide show. If you’re not into math and calculating the time needed for each slide to match your music, then let ProShow Gold sync the soundtrack by automatically setting both the transition times and slide display times. After you’ve decided how the slide show is going to look and sound, then you have to decide how to share it. As I mentioned earlier, there are nine ways to share slide shows and they are:

• Create a DVD to play on any DVD player
• Create a video CD that will play on most of the newer DVD players
• Create an Mpeg1 or Mpeg2 video file
• Share the slide show online by uploading it to the Photodex website
• Upload the slide show to your own website--ProShow Gold creates all the code you need
• Create an executable self-contained slide show that can be played on any Windows computer without any other special software
• Send that executable by email
• Create auto run CDs that will start automatically by placing the CD into a Windows computer
• Create Windows screensaver files [.scr]

There are several settings for each of the above listed slide show outputs. Suffice to say, there are plenty of choices. There are two programs to choose from, and both are free for the downloading: ProShow and ProShow Gold. Below is the difference between the two.

If you like what you try, ProShow is $29.95 whereas ProShow Gold is $69.95 and can be found at: http://www.photodex.com/. If you’re into digital photography then this software needs to be added to your library. It’s actually fun to watch the looks on people’s faces when the see these still pictures ‘moving’ for the first time. This software is definitely a keeper. u