FIRST EXPOSURE

JACK AND SUE DRAFAHL

FOR DECADES the slide projector has al-ways been the dominant method for pre-senting slide shows. Now that we have en-tered the digital world, the slide projectoris quickly becoming a part of photograph-ic history as it is replaced by the video pro-jector. In the early stages of development,the transition to these digital projectiondevices was slow. Often they were not ofvery good quality, and they cost severalthousand dollars. Thanks to technologicaladvancements, you can now get a greatprojector that rivals slide-projection quali-ty for under a thousand dollars.

In order to transfer your images to thevideo projector, you will need a computersystem and a software program. The soft-ware must mimic a dissolve unit and fea-ture a synchronized programmer and asound-editing system. This sounds like atall order that will probably cost a lot,right? Not to worry—Photodex Corpora-tion has just introduced its second versionthe ever popular ProShow Gold program.

If you enjoyed putting together slide

XPhotoDex ProShow Gold

shows, you are going to love this program.When the program first opens, you willfind a thumbnail database program thatresembles Microsoft's Explorer. Four basicwindow panes are displayed on the edit-

ing screen to help you assemble your pro-duction with ease. In the upper left, youhave the standard file folder menu system,where you can locate the images you wantto put in your presentation. In the middleof the left side you will see thumbnails ofeach file you select from the folder. Whenyou select a specific thumbnail, an en-larged version is displayed in the largeright pane.

The bottom pane is a timeline whereyou assemble your show. This is wherethe fun begins as the process is very easy.Look through the thumbnail images andwhen you find one you want in theshow, simply drag it into the slide tem-plate at the bottom of the screen. If youfind that the images are out of the desiredorder, just select any image in the time-line and drag it to a new position. Youcan also select several images at once anddeposit them on the time line to speedup the process.

In the past, when you produced slideshows that utilized multiple slide projec-

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Main edit screen for ProShow Cold, file/folder pane in the upper left, thumbnail pane is in the center left, enlarged selected viewin upper right, and the slideshow timeline is across the bottom.

RANCEFINDER • OCTOBER 2004

tors, your dissolve enabled you to makelimited transitions between images. Youcould cut from one image to another orsimply vary the length of the dissolve.Now you have many more options withProShow Gold. Between each slide in thetimeline, you will notice a small box thatindicates the transition effect. If you clickon the transition box, a palette of transi-tional effects is presented. As you moveyour mouse over each effect a small videothumbnail of the desired effect is pre-sented to help you make your selection.

You will see a second box, located justbelow the transition effect box. This con-trols the length of the effect and it can beset to thousandths of a second. There isone more box located directly beloweach image that allows you to set thetime that the image is held on the screenbeyond the transitional effect.

If you want to add music and narra-tion, you can add a soundtrack to thebottom of the timeline. As you add im-ages you can see how the show is pro-gressing by simply pressing the play but-ton at the top of the screen. The entireshow is then projected in the large paneon the right side of the editor. By review-ing as you go, you can easily add or sub-tract time to an image or adjust the tran-sitions.

froShow Gold makes it easy to exactlymatch the soundtrack length to thenumber of images. You simply use the"Fit to Soundtrack" command, and theprogram will reset the image and transi-tion times so that the images end at thesame time as the soundtrack. This optionis really handy if you already have yoursoundtrack selected and you are in ahurry to get the production finished.

Much of the power in ProShow Gold ishidden in the Options menu which canbe accessed by right-clicking on an image,or going to the slide pull-down menu.You then have controls for zooming, pan-ning, rotation, color balance, brightness,contrast, flipping and aspect ratios. Youcan also provide a feeling of motion tothe still images by using the motionpalette and zoom, pan or rotate the imageas the timeline progresses to the nextimage. The Options menu also allows youto add captions, additional sounds foreach image, and special backgrounds.

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When you press on one of the transition buttons between images on the timeline, a special menu with tran-sitions appears as on overlay. Moving your mouse over any of the transitions gives you a motion thumbnailof the effect.

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Transition menu with icons showing each transition's effect. The standard cut, wipe and dissolve functions arein the lower right of the menu. You will also note that the most recent transitions are also located just before thestandard transitions.

The Output options for ProShow Goldare even more impressive. When yourshow is complete, you can save a self-contained executable file that can be runon PC computers that don't have ProShow Gold installed. You also have theoption of making a Web slide show,MPEG II video file, Screen Saver, or

CD/DVD shows that can be run on yourtelevision. There is even an option forcreating an Autorun CD that starts run-ning your show as soon as it is installed.

This is probably one of the most eco-nomical, high quality, and efficient pro-grams we have seen yet for producingdigital slide shows. We could easily see

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