How to make a slideshow for a 5% of the production costs compared to Magnum in Motion. After using iMovie to put together a slideshow on my Mac, I decided to go with a another solution—Soundslides (Mac and PC) for a few simple reasons:
- Soundslides doesn’t tend to spit out huge files that need compression like iMovie does. Instead, it makes a moderately-sized flash file.
- Soundslides produces a still slideshow from still pictures, and not a pixelated movie version like iMovie does.
That’s it. I really like the look and feel of iMovie, but the pixelated results are just cheesy.
Some disadvantages to Soundslides are:
- Costs 40 dollars. iMovie is free with a Mac.
- Can’t edit the soundtrack within Soundslides like you can in iMovie. You’ve got to make edits in a separate program, then re-import the sound as an mp3 file. I use Audacity (freeware) because it allows more than one project to be open at a time, (cool looking Garageband won’t), so that cutting and pasting form one file to the other is easy.
- Can’t adjust slide transitions individually, like in iMovie.
- No Ken Burns effect.
Here’s a Soundslides tutorial Martin Fuchs put together on his blog Journal of a Photographer.
If you really want to go all the way like Magnum in Motion does, then Apple Pro has a profile on how they do it over there, using Final Cut Pro, Quicktime Pro, and Flash. As for me, I’m glad to get 95% of what I want done at 5% of the cost and necessary skills with a program like Soundslides.
0 Responses to “Putting together a slideshow with sound, or “Soundslides, Magnum in Motion, and the 95/5 principle””