Beyond PowerPointFrom Photos to DVDs: PART ONE | PART TWOWe have noticed two clear trends over the last few years of hosting the PowerPoint Live User Conference. The first is a growing desire to deliver content on DVD, and the second is an affinity for creating movies, be they promotional videos for business purposes or family videos commemorating significant lifecycle events. These two areas of interest share many challenges and rewards, not to mention an entire cottage industry and software niche. They also share something else: the conclusion reached by many that PowerPoint is no longer the right tool to use. |
Would that the Package for CD command contain the magic necessary to convert your PowerPoint presentations into a digital video stream that could be ripped directly to DVD. The cold truth is that there is no easy way -- only circuitous, multi-step routes – to place a PowerPoint presentation on a DVD.
The more glaring issue is the set of deficiencies that work against you when trying to create an evocative slide show to move or persuade an audience. To wit:
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Unreliable synchronization of music to imagery
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No support for fading an audio clip
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Inconvenient handling of photos
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Limited support for playing video
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Poor timeline
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Inability to combine or script zooming and panning
With the realization that the new version of Office is not going to address these shortcomings, many of us who have cut our teeth using PowerPoint to create digital video are now looking at other applications that are better suited to these tasks. You can spend as little as $50 or as much as $1,700 in the software niche that doesn’t really have an agreed-upon name yet. Some vendors refer to their programs as digital video creation tools; others as home movie makers. Some call this photo slide show creation; others prefer the more impressive digital production and post-production.
By any name, these programs all offer the following critical set of features:
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External referencing of photos: Instead of trying to import and digest megabytes worth of imagery, these programs store references to the external files. Any changes made to the source files are instantly reflected in the project, and you needn’t worry about downsampling the photos first to keep file sizes down. That is one of your export choices.
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Complete audio-video synchronization: No matter where you are in a movie’s timeline, you can confidently match an audio clip to the imagery behind it. If you want to cut to the Niagara Falls panorama right at the crescendo of Beethoven’s Fifth or when Kelly Clarkson hits a high note, that’s no problem, and you can test it by playing just that slide (in PowerPoint, you would have to start the slide show on the first slide that the music begins on in order to even hear the music).
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Built-in facilities for editing audio: PowerPoint requires that you edit your audio clip before importing it. Most, if not all, digital video software allows you to fade and clip imported audio, making it much easier to refine your timings.
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Support for video: These programs make very little distinction between still photos and motion video. If it’s a standard format, like TIF, BMP, JPG, AVI, MPG, WMV, they will accept the file and play the file.
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Direct export to most standard video formats and built-in DVD creation.
Creating or Burning?
If you are primarily interested in collecting video, photos, or other data and preserving them on a DVD’s 4GB of elbow room, then you have a multitude of software choices, ranging from $30 for a shareware program you can pick up on download.com to $300 for a full-featured menu-creation and quantity-burning application. These programs offer little in the way of creativity – you are expected to already have your content created and ready to be burned.
Most creative professionals will have little need for burn-only programs, because the software designed for content creation usually includes sufficient DVD-burning capability. At the top of the mountain is Adobe’s Production Studio Creative Suite, geared for those who work regularly with video (as opposed to mostly with still photography). This behemoth package could keep chiropractors in business for years, offering Premiere Pro, Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects (a dedicated object animation tool), Encore (for creating menu-driven DVDs), and Audition (a full-featured audio-editing package). This bundle retails for $1,699.
When you pull yourself off the floor, we’ll talk about the alternatives that cost a fraction of that price. CorelDraw users don’t need to purchase Photoshop and the rest of you likely have some flavor of Photoshop or a similar image-editing program. And if you need a program like Illustrator for vector-drawing work, you probably already have one of those, too. You can pick up a very good audio-clip editor for free (WavePad at http://www.nch.com.au/wavepad), and the slimmed-down Elements version of Premiere is a much more digestible $99.
Premiere is vintage Adobe: it is chocked full of features hiding behind an impossibly vast array of toolbars, icons, and other interfaciala. If you already speak Adobe, you’ll be comfortable with either flavor of Premiere; if not, then even the $99 for Elements might be more than you’ll want to invest. Adobe’s user interface philosophy does not vibrate particularly well with me, yet I have become quite comfortable working with Premiere Elements.
Ulead and Pinnacle Systems both offer video creation tools, however the latter company was unwilling to send us a press evaluation copy and its website does not offer a free trial. That typically suggests a red flag for us in the customer service area, but your mileage might vary. Ulead’s MediaStudio Pro is an impressive $399 bundle with many intuitive and friendly features for capturing video, integrating audio, and assembling the pieces of a slide show. It includes the highly-regarded SmartSound technology for customized creation of royalty-free audio to fit any length of video. Its output options are limited, however, and DVD creation requires that you launch a separate application.
Which brings us to Pro Show from Photodex, the most intuitive and “creative-friendly” application we know of for digital photographers. You can start with a free trial download of the $29 Pro Show and within less than 10 minutes (seven to be exact, but who’s counting...other than us), be creating slide shows from your photos. You’ll want to get to at least the $69 Pro Show Gold level to enjoy captioning, transparency, better motion control, and DVD creation. The $399 Producer version supports RAW photo formats, hyperlinked captions, DVD menu creation, and perhaps most important, support for multiple layers on a slide, making picture-in-picture and similar effects routine.
Pro Show will import all forms of video but it does not capture video. If your work is primarily video capture and editing, you’d be better off with Elements. But if most of your work is with photos, Pro Show offers unparalleled flexibility (and with Microsoft Movie Maker available for free to all Windows users, you can always use it to capture video and save it to a format that Pro Show can import).
Pro Show’s interface invites experimentation on the path to learning. If you’re not sure what you can do with a photo that you have dragged to your timeline, just double-click it and a window full of all controls and effects appears. Double-click an audio clip and you will be taken directly to all soundtrack options. Adding a transition between slides is as simple as clicking between the two slides. No other program provides this level of control in such an intuitive way.
Finally, Pro Show Gold’s and Producer’s output choices are positively dizzying. You can export your slide shows as MPEG-1 or -2 video, compressed and uncompressed AVI, high-resolution executable file for Windows PCs, a web stream, five flavors of video CD, low-res emailable version, and DVD, either direct burn or ISO creation.
The program’s chief deficiencies, while surmountable, range from mildly annoying to downright irritating:
DICEY TRANSPARENCIES: While PNG files with alpha channels and clipping paths are supported, that support needs to be more solid. Reports abound of Photoshop and CorelDraw files not importing correctly. (P.S., recent updates have addressed this, and most transparent PNG files we export from Draw 12 and X3 work much better in Pro Show Producer.)
MAC SUPPORT: DVDs you create with Pro Show can play on any PC, Windows or Mac, but many of the program’s other output options shut out Mac users. The Web stream and self-executing file choices are PC only, and there is no Quick Time Movie export available. We’re already seeing a big move toward running slide shows on iPods and the Quick Time format is the front door for that. It would be a shame if the iPod revolution caused potential customers to overlook Pro Show because of this lack of support.
NO CROPPING: If you want to crop a photo, you need to retreat to your image editor or resort to a convoluted masking technique whereby the photo peeks through a rectangle with a hole in it. Cropping is not rocket science and we suspect that this capability can be added to the program with relative ease.
WEIRD COPY PROTECTION: Before I criticize Photodex for this, I will laud its developers for a clever form of copy protection by way of a hardware key – a small USB device that must be plugged into a port in order for the program to run. There are no restrictions on how many times you install the software and on how many machines, but it can only be operating at the location that houses the hardware key.
This is as ingenuous as it is troubling. Photodex cuts you little slack if you lose it, charging a hefty replacement fee. And there are just enough reports of hardware keys not being recognized by the program to call into question this strategy.
But these factors are not what bother us about the hardware key; we fear the specter of the idea catching on. What if other programs begin instituting the hardware key? What if a half dozen of your primary apps all require them? You would need to invest in a USB hub just for the keys. Ultimately, this could send us back to the 1980s, when you needed a “program diskette” in order to run Lotus 1-2-3, dBase, and WordPerfect. If this idea takes hold, we would have to carry around multiple hardware keys to run our software, amounting to a colossal step backward in software portability. This is why we hope that Photodex, and all other programs, decide to forego or never pursue hardware-based copy protection.
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Shortcomings aside, we find Pro Show Producer to be the program in this product category that just works. It has that almost-magical quality of making sense the moment you begin working with it. This was so pronounced for us that we almost literally established a new business as a result of our ability to connect with the software, and if you visit the Portfolio page at www.PhotosToMemories.net, you will see examples of photo slide shows that were created and published in 48 hours or less.
In Part II of this exploration next month, we will discuss the mechanics of creating slide shows – the creative opportunities, logistic hurdles, and some of our favorite techniques for stirring the senses. If you follow along, no matter how casually, you’ll likely agree that we’ve come a long way from the Photo Album feature of PowerPoint.