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ProShow Gold 3 from Photodex
ProShow Gold 3 from Photodex
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ProShow Gold 3 from Photodex

From Sue Chastain,
Your Guide to Graphics Software.
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Guide Rating - rating

The Bottom Line

ProShow Gold allows you to create simple to elaborate digital photo slide shows for computer and TV playback. The software is highly customizable, with hundreds of transition effects, many audio options, the popular "Ken Burns" pan and zoom motion effects, and a variety of output formats. Although Proshow Gold is more expensive than some competing software, it offers a lot of sophistication but still remains easy to use for beginners. A feature-limited Standard version is available at a reduced price and a more advanced Producer version is also available.
Pros
  • Lots of customization options.
  • Hundreds of transitions with preview capability.
  • Output many formats; integrated CD, VCD, and DVD burning with DVD menus.
  • Work with layers for adding multiple photos or videos to each slide.
Cons
  • Some windows are a fixed size and it would be nice to enlarge them for a bigger preview.
  • For Windows only.

Description

  • Create professional slide shows from still photos, then output them for playback on a computer or TV.

  • Add background sound tracks, text captions, audio captions, motion and transition effects.

  • More than 280 professional transition effects with convenient preview and selection.

  • Output MPEG, DVD, VCD (Video CD), HD video, Flash, QuickTime, WMV, Autorun CD, screen saver, or stand-alone executable.

  • Combine VCD/DVD with Autorun CD to make one disc that will play in a computer or DVD player.

  • Apply image adjustments, motion effects, sounds, captions, and backgrounds to each slide.

  • Image options: Crop, rotate, flip, scale, colorize, fix red-eye, sharpen; adjust color, brightness, and tone.

  • Audio options: Precise control over timing, volume, offset, and fade in/out. Import audio from disc and use multiple tracks.

  • Motion effects: Pan, zoom, and rotate slides for the "Ken Burns" effect. Adjust acceleration styles for motion effects.

  • Available in Standard, Gold, and Producer editions for Windows. A time-limited trial download is available.

Guide Review - ProShow Gold 3 from Photodex

ProShow Gold is a feature-rich program for creating slide shows from your pictures, video clips, and music. It's easy enough to complete a show in less than ten minutes, but with all the customization options available, you may find yourself spending much longer to add effects, synchronize audio, and personalize your shows with captions. One nice feature in ProShow is the ability to automatically adjust the time of all slides to sync your show time to match your background soundtrack.

Version 2 added DVD burning, video import, more transitions, and the popular "Ken Burns" pan and zoom effects. Version 3 brings layers, more editing tools, additional caption effects (including the popular "galactic scroll"), a timeline view, improved rendering, and increased output options such as Flash, HD video, and Windows Media Video. The layers feature is very nice, allowing you to include multiple photos and videos in a single slide. Each photo can have its own image and motion effects, so you can do some really neat things with that.

PhotoDex managed to eliminate all the "cons" I had listed in my previous version review. Although I had problems with the program slowing down over time, it was quite a large project and things came back up to speed after reopening the program. The auto-save function came in very handy during this project. (Note: Updating to version 3.2 seems to have resolved this, or else it was an issue with my computer.)

After creating a photo slide show, you can export it to common video formats, or burn it to a CD or DVD for computer or TV viewing in a DVD player. Multiple shows can be burned to a single disc with fancy DVD menus for selecting shows by remote control. In addition, ProShow can generate Windows screen savers, streaming Web shows, and self-contained executables that will play on any Windows PC.

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