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Sharing Your Work in a Multimedia World: Using ProShow Gold

Tom BryantFeb, 2009

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• With our photography, we try to evoke a mood or feeling or response to our photos. By adding music and proper transitions and timing to several photos, the response can be enhanced.

• If we want to share photos of travel or other subjects of a photojournalistic nature, a slideshow is an ideal and inexpensive medium for sharing. A descriptive narration can be easily added.

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Sharing Your Work• Prints• Personal Web Page• Web-based photo sites

• Picasa, Flickr, Kodak, Shutterfly, many others • SmugMug

• Self-published print-on-demand photo books• Lulu, many others

• Digital slide show• Windows Picture and Fax viewer• Windows Movie Maker, other video editors• ProShow Gold

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Why Should Someone Spend $70 for a Program, When There Are Free Ones Out There?

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Twenty Bloomin’ Years

• Twentieth anniversary celebration of Botanical Garden

• Prepared by Candace Garber using ProShow Gold

• ProShow is full-featured and reliable. It has a very robust backup.

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Good Things - ProShow• Program of choice by HPS visitors• Can produce show in high resolution.

• Can produce show in lower resolution for image protection.

• Can produce different format outputs from one show.

• Really like executable output.• Can produce streaming video output

that can be put on web site.• Streaming video protects images somewhat

from copying. ProShow format can be password protected for family members only, etc.

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More Likes• Supports Photoshop files directly.• Compatible with Photoshop in edit.• Adding narration is easy.• Collect Show Files is a very

convenient feature for backing up a show or moving it to another computer.

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More Likes• Show length is exactly defined.

• Can be an advantage.• Classes

• Andrea Shetley teaches a class in Fayetteville on ProShow.

• Web-based online classes available• Candace and I just started using it,

with Bill Snoddy as a resource.

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Dislikes

• No printed paper output.• User-selected slide changing not as

convenient as PowerPoint.• Press Spacebar to pause show• Use PgUp and PgDn keys to advance

or back up Comments

• Original 3.0 release had bugs.• No Apple version

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Why worry about resolution?

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Comparison of Resolution

• Crop of original image.

• After rendering for DVD.

• People are accustomed to poor TV resolution. HDTV is changing this.

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Making a Show

• SAVE OFTEN! All of these apps are processing intensive and sometimes crash. ProShow has auto-save feature and will run better after a save.

• Gather assets (still images, videos, background music).

• Compose slideshow• Add background music• Add narration if desired.• Preview• Prepare output file. SAVE

OFTEN!

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Show Guidelines• Speed of show sets the mood.

• 5 seconds duration per slide is average.

• 3 seconds or less is energetic.• Look at clip length on TV, movies, etc.

• Background music tempo should match desired mood.• Larry Perry likes New Age music

(Yanni, Katara)

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More Show Guidelines• Transitions – use with care!

• Overuse looks amateurish• Most TV and movie editing uses CUT and FADE.

Commercials sometimes use flashier transitions.• CUT is most energetic. FADES give a more relaxed

mood, and can indicate continuity of mood. • Insert a black panel and fade in and out for time of

day change, mood change, etc.

• I like to believe that my images are compelling enough without having to resort to flashy transitions.

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More Show Guidelines• After selecting order of slides, set slide

duration. CTRL-A selects all.• Select transition style and set. Again,

CTRL-A.• Remember, overuse looks amateurish. I just

use CUT and FADE. • Default is 4.5 sec slide duration and a 1.5

sec fade transition. (6 seconds total per slide).

• Do slide motion (pan and zoom) now. Don’t go too fast.

• Refine durations for individual slides. Check with Timeline view.

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More Show Guidelines

• Don’t be too disappointed if you pass out copies of your work and people do not have time to watch it.• The person who gets the most out of it

is likely to be you.

• Consider giving shows at Alzheimer’s Care Units, nursing homes, etc.

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Opening Screen

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Special Editors

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Light Box

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Image Edit

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Transitions – Use with care.

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Captions• Put a duplicate slide after captioned one.

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Credits• Put black panel at end. Copy and add “Thanks

to”. Copy two more times. Put text on each and select Fly In - Pan Down and Fly Out - Pan Down.

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Narration• ProShow attaches narration to each slide. It

can span many slides or slide duration can be set to hold until narration is complete. This allows inserting and removing slides without disturbing narration much.

• I prefer a mike with lots of gain, but this is a function of your sound card. My favorite is a cheap web phone mike with a foam cap added.

• If you use “override sound track” controls, make sure you stop recording immediately when narration is over. Otherwise, volume stays down for awhile and sound track is rough.

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Narration

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Motion - 1

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Motion - 2

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Background Audio or Sound Track• ProShow likes to add sound track from CD,

probably because of copyright concerns• Unlike narration, which is attached to

individual slides, Sound track is not. It is most convenient to arrange images first and set slide duration and then add sound tracks. Then slide duration can be automatically fine-tuned to match the Sound track.

• From pull-down menus, go to Audio/Save music from CD. I suggest you change the default title from Track # to something more descriptive.

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More Sound Track• Go to Audio/Manage SoundTrack. Here

you can arrange the tracks in proper order. Then click on desired track and click “Edit Fades and Timing”. Here you can set desired duration of sound and fades.

• To add Sound Track from a music file such as .mp3, go to Timeline view by pressing Tab key. Bring up My Music folder or wherever it is stored, and drag file onto track below slides. You can hold CTRL down and set sound fades manually here.

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Timeline View

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DVD Output• Preferred by many for ease of showing.• Inexpensive, 25 cents per disc and $1.15 for

mailing.• It will render to 640 x 480 pixels resolution.

Since half the information is being sent, motion video is smoother on an old machine.

• Using a high quality setting on a standard DVD changes bitrate only for smoother motion but no improvement in resolution.

• All defaults are OK except for Desaturation. I would uncheck it.

• Blu-ray has won the latest format war over HD-DVD. Proshow 3.0 supports a high-definition output but can’t burn directly to Blu-ray disc.

• The large installed base of standard DVD means it should be universal for awhile.

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DVD Output

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Executable Output – My favorite.

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ProShow Streaming Video

• Works well for me. • Requires a web site for hosting. Most

ISPs provide some hosting space. HIWAAY’s is 50 meg. Seven-minute high-res ProShow show is 40 meg.

• Requires a proprietary viewer free from Photodex that is automatically downloaded upon the first viewing.

• Can password protect show if desired.

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ProShow Streaming Video

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Flash Video Streaming

• Uses Adobe Flash Player. Over 90% of computers have this viewer installed.

• Microsoft has announced that the successor to Windows Vista will support Flash video directly.

• YouTube uses this viewer. • YouTube has a convenient interface for uploading but

poor resolution at 320 x 240.• Perhaps can now stream at higher resolution

• Resolution of Flash file can be increased so it should make a good looking show.• I haven’t been able to achieve the quality I want or

to stream more than 5 minutes using the Flash file. I don’t know if this is a problem with ProShow version 3.2 or something inherent to my ISP, etc.

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Flash Video Streaming

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Other output types

• MPEG• QuickTime• Windows Media• YouTube

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• ProShow Gold is now at version 4.0. All this has used version 3.2.

• A trial version is available free at: http://photodex.com It is full-featured and places a yellow bar across the output. After purchase, the key removes the yellow bar. Version 4.0 fully supports Blu-Ray.

• My web page is at: http://home.hiwaay.net/~ctbryant/ This presentation and a slide show are there.