What's the best program for making a slide show for YouTube?

Dick Sanders · Sep 7, 2008

I want to make a slide show for YouTube. It will be about 32 B&W images fading in from black and out to black, with a musical soundtrack over about 4 minutes.

I have Windows MovieMaker and have made a slide show with it before, but is there a better program, or is that plenty good enough? What are the YouTube requirements? And the procedure for posting there?

I have a friend who is a pro guitarist and composer doing original music. I just need to know the best way to put this together for viewing on YouTube. Thanks.

Bifurcator · Sep 8, 2008

iPhoto and iMovie will do that. They're free with your computer if you bought a Mac.

Both will upload the slide show to youtube for you with a single mouse click.

andrew99 · Sep 8, 2008

Movie Marker is limited, you can change the time between slide changes, but only globally - you can't change it on a per-slide basis... also that program generally sucks (freezes, crashes, hard to use, etc). I'll be watching this thread to see if there are better (hopefully freeware) programs for Windows! I want to do the same thing for flickr since flickr now accepts video.

kundalini · Sep 8, 2008

I bought Nero a few years ago to create slideshows from stills and video. Haven't messed with it in quite a while, but I remember that it was pretty easy to use, add sound tracks, add text, manipulate images and clips, mix up fades and then burn to DVDs. Not sure about uploading to youtube though. Probably something better out there, but it was cheap.

iflynething · Sep 8, 2008

Unless you are wanting to get in to the nitty gritty and make crutial changes, the Movie Maker will work just fine. I have made some nice slideshows of my friends family ([ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SoAD0ocKOxc[/ame]) and of my beach trip. They came out pretty well.

Are you looking for more features than Movie Maker has to offer?

~Michael~

Orrza · Sep 9, 2008

I would say try to find "Pro-show" products.
They have gold additions of their "producer" - these are the best I have seen so far.
Go to youtube and search for "Orrza" - you will find two slideshows I made with this program.

Dick Sanders · Sep 9, 2008

Thanks for the help. I have a PC. I have MovieMaker and Nero, but I want to make sure I'll get the best quality show for YouTube. I like the quality of the Orrza slide show on YouTube. I'll check out the Pro-Show "producer" product. Any other recs?

JerryPH · Sep 10, 2008

Orrza said:
I would say try to find "Pro-show" products.
They have gold additions of their "producer" - these are the best I have seen so far.
Go to youtube and search for "Orrza" - you will find two slideshows I made with this program.

Great slideshows... however, I wonder how the artists would feel that you are using commercial music on it with a high chance of you not having paid royalties to the artists and song owners and then posting it on YouTube... just a thought.

ProShow Gold is awesome. Most of the wedding photographers that I know that make slideshows as part of their packages use it a lot for making low-res shows for youtube.

http://www.photodex.com/products/proshowgold

Yeah, its not free, but its EASY, FAST and well worth it. I plan to add this to my list of toys within a week or so. For very complex videos, I use Pinnacle Studio 12 Ultimate, but for Youtube, this is way overkill.