Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2001/10/01
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Thanks to all of you who responded both on and off list regarding slide show software. Some first impressions: 1) Microsoft Powerpoint - Windows: ~$295/Mac: ~$355 (http://www.microsoft.com/office/) Allows precise control of slide layout. Has basic animations for text. With the Windows version, you can have a background track playing, in addition to sounds that are "attached" to a given slide. You cannot have narration going on during a transition unless the narration is on the background audio track. But putting narration on the background track is risky because there is no way to lock a given image to a specific point in the background audio track as you would with a traditional multitrack tape deck + controller and film projectors. When an embedded sound on a page is encountered, the background track stops playing altogether. Plus, even on my test machine - a dual 800mhz G4 with 512mb ram, the audio gets choppy if other tasks are going on at the same time. This problem should go away altogether with Office X running under Mac OS X. A big plus for the Mac version, however, is that you can make a Quicktime movie from your presentation! Though your presentation isn't as compact as you might like, the quality can be wonderful. And those Quicktime transitions are just great. Summary: Powerpoint is suitable for slideshows where you are going to do the narration live and control the slide changes. Background audio cannot be sychronized. Windows version under Win2k allows smooth integration of sounds and videos on top of an image page. Mac version has support for Quicktime transitions, so crossfades are extremely smooth on a fast Mac. 2) RealSlideShow - $99 (http://www.realnetworks.com/products/slideshow/index.html) RealSlideShow, from Real Networks, is a simple SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language). The good news is that SMIL is a standard, so any work you do in SMIL is inherently cross-platform. Unfortunately, RealSlideShow converts all audio files into thier proprietary format when generating a project and resizes your photos automatically whether you like it or not. If you've photoshopped an image to 1024x768 just the way you want it for projection, you don't want your SMIL tool fiddling with it! It is possible to synch the slides to a background audio track, but it is very tedious to do so, because you cannot interactively preview your project. You must generate the whole project before you can test. You can record narration to play on top of the background audio track, but it is per slide only. Transitions are browser/viewer based, so the subjective quality of a crossfade, for example, depends on the view you're using. When viewing with the RealSlideShow viewer, crossfades are fine at low (web/cd) resolutions, but choppy at 1024x768. Summary: RealSlideShow is good for delivering slide shows on the Web. Editor is barely adequate. More manual control would be welcome for professionals. Produces industry standard SMIL code, but converts audio to .ram files. Rescales images whether you like it or not. Possible to Synch audio with slide changes, but the editor's interface makes this tedious. Resulting project is very compact. Big plus: RealSlideShow basic is FREE! The full $99 version allows more advanced features for animating text, controlling layout, and adding interactivity. Worth noting: You can write HTML+TIME (a subset of SMIL 2.0) code with any simple text editor and play your slide show with Internet Explorer. IE6 now supports SMIL transitions! 3) iMovie - FREE with your Macintosh (http://www.apple.com/imovie/) Yes, that's right, iMovie! In many ways, iMovie is THE ideal tool for creating slide shows. It is timeline-based, so you can synchronize transitions with your background audio track with great precision. You can preview interactively with one click, and slide your slide durations around visually until it is just right. When you're done, you just export a Quicktime movie. The downside to iMovie for slide shows is iMovie rescales your images to NTSC resolution as soon as you import them. So, it's unsuitable for projected 1024x768 presentations. Also, the resulting Quicktime file can be quite large. But for kiosk or CD-ROM deployment, it may be the ideal solution. Summary: The perfect tool for slide shows, if only you could do better than NTSC! 4) LiveSlideShow - $49.95 (http://www.totallyhip.com) A Quicktime-based solution that allows simple sequencing of slides. No background audio, though you can attach sounds to individual slides. The Windows version of the demo GPF'd on me several times. Will check the Mac version and report to the list. Apparently, thier other product, "LiveStage", allows far greater control, but the current version costs $950! Several users of LiveSlideShow have commented to me that it may be possible to sequence the slides with LiveSlideShow, then add a synched audio track with a late stage Quicktime editor such as the one included with Adobe GoLive. Summary: TBD Net Net: Go for something that's based on standards or at least de-facto standards. I like the concept or creating slide shows in SMIL, because there will be any number of viewers out there before long. Your content is cross-platform from the start, just like HTML pages. IE6 already support many SMIL features, and Quicktime will offer SMIL 2.0 support in the next major release. Still, SMIL is very new, so there is little support in terms of editors and other tools. By contrast, there are loads of tools for Quicktime, as well as alot of knowledge out there in the user community. Quicktime itself is more than capable of delivering the kind of high-res slide shows we're after, but the question is authoring. From what I can tell, it should be possible to create high-res slide shows with Quicktime that are reasonably compact, and have fully synched audio. In the next few weeks, I will be looking at the FinalCut Pro, GoLive Quicktime, and Quicktime Pro Editors to gauge thier suitablity for building slide shows. - --Jim Laurel - -- To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html