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Home >> Photography >> Digital Photodex
ProShow Gold 2.0 This is a quick and dirty little review, because as I typed this out, I’ve owned the software for less than 24 hours, but thought enough of it to hack out a piece immediately. What do you think of when someone says “slideshow?” I bet you think back to the days when your father or grandfather made the family sit in front of a projection screen and watch vacation slides on a Saturday night. Slideshows seem so 20th century, so, so like, before you were even born kind of passé. However, there is nothing like a good slide show to really show off a series of photos, but the use of the ancient slide projector is indeed truly passé in this day and age. Today Microsoft PowerPoint is king and so ubiquitous that doing a speech or presentation without it is the exception, slideshows are everywhere. Heck, one can now buy a digital projector for under CAN $1000 now, quite tempting... Since this web site is about photography, we are obviously not interested in the cheesy text and graph driven presentations of businesses, but of visual drama to enhance our photos and possible sell ourselves and our services. I had been looking for a good slideshow program for sometime now. I had a big interest a couple of years followed by a lull, but I kept my eye open for applications that had slideshow features to see if any met my requirements. I even bought a little shareware program that produced what I thought were acceptable shows despite it taking an inordinate amount of time to create one, but they turned out to be less than acceptable outside of my closed loop computing environment. The program I used back then did not have a very good workflow and I had to manually coordinate the slides with an audio track, e.g., if I wanted to use a five-minute song, with a 3 second transition for each slide, that meant in theory, having around 100 slides available to fill the five-minute space. Unfortunately, I literally spent hours tweaking one show just to get the timing right by adding in or dropping slides because the theoretical did not always meet the practical hands on creation of a show. This was because the transitions between the slides affected the timing and were added onto the 3 second time I set, so I usually had to go with a 2 second display time for the slide, with about a second for the transition. I generally find any longer than 3 seconds and the show appears to drag and any less than 2 seconds and the show zips by too fast for anyone’s comfort. I put up with the limitations of the US $25 shareware back then not knowing that much about what to look for and what alternatives were available. A friend suggested that what I really needed was video editing software that would allow me to work with a timeline and drop in slides or videos with background music to get around the lengthy workflow. Other problems emerged with the slideshows created with the shareware. While the timing of the show, worked at length with much blood, sweat and tears…okay, maybe just a lot of caffeine and bleary eyed late nights, would play fine on my own computer, but they were either unplayable or so slow as to be unplayable on other computers. Back then I was using a Pentium 4 1.7 GHz box to create those slideshows, but played back on anything lesser than this would result in people complaining that while the music played normally, the slides would only transition after about a minute...each! But play those shows back on a faster machine and the slides would transition faster than the music. All of that coffee driven hard work wound up being as valuable as the coffee grinds used to juice me up. I heard that this was a problem not uncommon to other slideshow programs and thus my interest drifted until I remembered cruising the ‘net and coming across ProShow Gold, but I wasn’t too interested in the US $70 price tag at the time. But a recent review in Rangefinder magazine tweaked my interest again and as Photodex, the development company, offers a free trial session, I had nothing to lose trying it out. After using it to create a slideshow within the first hour of use, I went back online and purchased a license and now consider the $70 price tag to be cheap and well worth the money for the lack of time required and aggravation saved in creating a show. It isn’t perfect with one snag discovered while trying to create an auto run CD, but more on that later. The ProShow Gold interface is quite logical and anyone who uses Photoshop CS’ image browser or some RAW file converters should feel at home. The workflow is little bit like Microsoft’s Movie Maker with a file explorer window, thumbnail view, and large detail window available along with a timeline to drag and drop images into.
Creating a slideshow is just that easy, click and drag into the timeline. If you find yourself out of sequence, you can drag a slide out to another location, or highlight a series of slides and do a Control C and then Control V where you want to insert them. Pretty darn easy. In between each slide is a transition icon that you can click on to choose from dozens and dozens of different types of transitions. The really cool thing is that there’s a thumbnail view of the image and how the transition actually works on it to transition to the next image.
The really great feature about ProShow Gold is the ability to automatically set the length of the slideshow to be exactly that of the song you want to be played. No fuss, no muss, it just works, but you do have to keep in mind any lengthy fadeouts that your song may have at the end. For example, on a CD, the song’s length may technically be five-minutes, but in actuality it may only be 4:55 minutes with a 5 second fade out to nothing, but ProShow Gold can’t know that and take that fade out into account, so keep that in mind for the songs you choose. One workaround I can think of is to have a custom end slide that has your name, business, contact and copyright information, to appropriately fill the end gap of your song. Something like: Jane
and John’s Wedding Brought
to you by Copyright
©
ProShow Gold allows you to create auto run CDs, DVDs and files. You can load more than one show in an executable file and have them individually available in an opening menu screen.
You can set a maximum screen size the shows will display in to ensure that those still running 15 inch monitors can still enjoy the shows properly. For the business types, ProShow Gold will even allow you to create password protected executables as well as time limits for how long the slideshows can be accessed by a client. Pretty slick.
For the auto run CD option you can choose to include all the original files if desired, but I doubt I’d ever want to do that. But as hinted at earlier, the executable CD option is not as good as it sounds because it just does not work properly. It may have to do with the slideshow being such a pig of a file that the CD drive cannot access and send data at a fast enough rate to accommodate the show. I’ve created or copied the executable files on three different computers and none will work properly. Copying the executable file from the CD to the hard drive will alleviate the problem, but it takes one major feature out of the running, the ability to distribute your slideshows on an auto run CD. It mattered little whether the slideshows were high resolution or limited to 800x600 resolution and about the only thing I can think or trying next is setting the audio quality to be less than high quality, but we’re talking about MP3 files, which are already compressed significantly. I’ve not tried creating a slideshow meant for the web, as that wasn’t my interest in buying ProShow Gold, so no comment about this feature.
For my primary need to be able to create slideshows to show to prospective clients, ProShow Gold fits the bill. In fact earlier today, before writing the review, I was playing back a slideshow created in a bare 20 minutes for a couple that I was the second photographer at. I had been futzing around until 3 am the night before creating my first show and then I get a call from my friend Larry the next morning to see if I was going to able to come by to meet the clients, and could I bring along my slideshow? The clients were coming by to pick up their albums and we were hoping to present them with a nice little bonus of the slideshows. As luck would have it, from the time I get off the phone with Larry to the time I arrive at his place to prepare, I had no time to create a new show that would highlight the whole wedding day. The night before I had only time to create a long ceremony show, as well as a short one for the dancing that occurred during the reception using the Bee Gees’ Staying Alive as the music J I get to Larry’s place at 12 noon. The clients are going to arrive around 12:30 pm. After greetings and then setting up my Toshiba P20 notebook, the time was 12:10 pm before I could get started. I ended up with 90 slides from the digital files of 24 rolls of film and ripped a CD track that Larry wanted to use. 12:30
pm the clients arrive and I’m putting the finishing touches to the
executable file. 12:35 pm, the clients sit down in front of my notebook
and watch the slideshow just completed. At the end of the five-minute
show, the bride is tearing up and it becomes a great intro for reviewing
their proofs.
While I am quite impressed with the ease of creating a high quality slide show, that high quality bites you in the hand with the lack of a usable auto run CD option. With a year’s worth of free upgrades available after purchase, I do hope that Photodex will improve this feature. If not for this issue, ProShow Gold is nearly perfect for my needs. My only other minor beef so far is that I’d like the ability to have more customizable titles for each show. A text box with multiple line capabilities rather than a single line space would alleviate this irritant. ProShow Gold is worth a look for those looking for a capable slideshow creator to run directly off of a computer and this review has only looked at still image slideshow creation, whereas the application can work with integrated video and stills too. Update: After a full week of using ProShow Gold, I needed to rewrite my initial updates and clarify some things about it. The more I used it and discovered what it could do, the more I became very impressed with its power and flexibility. I continually tweaked the same shows over this period and went through about 10 CD/DVDs to find the best mix of settings to use for the best shows. Some points to keep in mind that are that:
After a few hiccups, I have to say ProShow Gold has been worth every last cent I paid for it thanks to the very easy ability to create, edit and tweak slideshows. Recommended! Link to Photodex May 16, 2006 - After writing about ProShow Gold, I receive a few emails from users commenting/complaining about various bugs in the software that made it lose some of that Gold luster. I couldn’t say much because I hadn’t experienced any problems, until now. Some users complained about their DVD burner stalling during a burn session and I found myself experiencing the same problem recently. I thought that maybe the large jobs that the other users were creating might have been a cause, but now I think that there’s an inherent incompatibility issue with certain brands of burners, as my jobs were nowhere as large and complex as some I’ve heard about. In some instances ProShow Gold apparently does not like seeing multiple burners in the computer and will stall and lockup the chosen burner. I use two burners, an LG and BenQ, so I disabled LG and for a brief minute the BenQ appeared to work, but then it stalled again. I also thought that maybe my BenQ Lightscribe burner wasn’t compatible with ProShow Gold, but a check of Photodex’s list of compatible burners has it listed. Selecting my other LG burner presented no problems even with the BenQ active. Prior to buying the BenQ, I had another LG DVD burner and having two active LG burners never presented a problem with ProShow Gold. The only solution is to choose to burn to an ISO image instead of to a DVD burner. This will create a compressed file with all the folders and files necessary to burn to a DVD using your burning software of choice. Using WinRAR, I decompressed the files into a folder and started up Nero for burning. Nero warns me that if I choose a simple data DVD to burn that my files won’t be video compliant, but this is bunk and if you choose to follow Nero’s instructions for creating a video DVD, you’ll find that you won’t be able to burn all the files and folders that ProShow Gold has created. So, if you use Nero too, just use the data DVD option and all will be find, because I immediately tested the new DVD in my home player and it played perfectly. It certainly seems to me that ProShow Gold is quite picky about which burners it will play nice with even if those burners are “suppose” to be compatible. Given my good history with LG burners, I’d suggest that brand’s products first if you’re a ProShow Gold user looking to upgrade burners. I would have bought another LG burner if given the choice, but the only LightScribe burner the shop I went to had was the BenQ unit. May 22, 2006 - One last note about ProShow Gold and burning to an ISO image instead of directly to a DVD. If you burn to an ISO image, you can add more folders and files and top up the DVD's capacity. Adding folders and files to the DVD does nothing to effect the video files, but you'll get added functionality in being able to store all the proof images for example, instead of just the image files used for the slideshow. For example, if I have 200 images in a folder that I select from for a slide show and if I only used 150 of them, ProShow Gold will allow you to burn the image file content in a "Show" folder on the DVD. But, burning directly to a DVD only gets you the 150 images used in the actual slide show. By burning to an ISO image and then decompressing the files to a burn folder, you can add back the 50 unused image files to the "Show" folder, so that the client has a complete record of all the proof images. It helps the make the DVD a dual purpose disc in being a slide show and your proof file disc, and, you can also add in more content besides just the slide show material. |
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