Slideshows - what program(s) do you use?

[AnimotoRebecca]

This is, of course, assuming you use slideshows in your business/for fun.

If you do, what programs do you like/dislike and why? Also, do you re-sell the slideshows or use them to show off your photography online, to clients, etc?

Thanks!

 

[Big Mike]

Proshow (Gold).

That's what everyone was recommending so I checked it out. It's easily the best slideshow software that I've ever used....although I haven't tried too many.

I used it quite often, a few years ago...but slideshows just doesn't seem to be as popular these days.

 

[skieur]

I have used Powerpoint, which has a lot of flexibility and makes it possible to mix animation with stills. The disadvantage is that a lot of memory, speed and processing power is necessary. The consequences are that you may have to reduce all the pics down to a certain size and "weight", limit transitions and keep your fancier work several slides away from other sophisticated transitions or animations to keep memory and cache from getting "stuck in the mud" or slowed down to a crawl.

skieur

 

[musicaleCA]

Powerpoint is a terrible, terrible program compared to Keynote. (No, I'm not being an Apple fanboy. Pages is weak sauce compared to Word, though more intuitive. Excel has an edge on Numbers in some areas such as hard formulae and just inputting vast, vast amounts of data, but falls shot on visualizing and organizing said data.)

And I use Keynote. For every presentation I ever do. It can do nary everything PP can do, but more intuitively and better (and setting up key frames is so freaking easy for animations! ).

 

[IgsEMT]

Sony Vegas Pro 8
+ Very easy to use and to learn.
+ Very intuitive
- Limited in effects and output formats
Abobe Premiere Pro CS3
- Much more difficult to learn
- Less intuitive
+ more features with greater deviation from default settings.
+ almost NO limits what it can accomplish.

 

[bhphotography]

I use animoto when I'm at home and have access to the internet. When I'm onsite at weddings, I put on a day of slideshow, so I only have 1 hr to prepare it. I'll just use the windows slide show as I just start it and leave it.

 

[cfusionpm]

I've done work in After Effects CS4. Once you wrap your head around the idea precomps (I call them sub comps), its pretty easy to make a template and throw the pictures in subcomp duplicates. AE is a lot easier for doing flashy 3D or particle work over Premiere. But if you don't need overly complicated animations or effects, Premiere is still a fantastic tool.

 

[RyanLilly]

I'll Agree that PowerPoint sucks. Keynote works much better, and doesn't get bogged down like PowerPoint.(but you have to be using a mac) I was actually working at a big corporate event, and all over the clients PowerPoint presentations were on the corporate server in the UK, when our client downloaded them onto her laptop, she came to find that they were created in the most recent version of PowerPoint and wouldn't even open on her PC. We loaded them in to keynote on a MacBook, and they ran flawlessly. Go figure. Plus you can use an iphone or ipod touch as a remote and actually see your presentation in your hand and have your notes all in your remote.