Showing a slideshow to an audience on a projector can be a daunting task. We give you some tips to make things easier. Planning, composition, and equipment will make things go smoothly.

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You've just created your perfect slideshow.

You've gathered your photos, arranged them in the timeline, adjusted motion effects, backgrounds, and layouts, added titles, music, transition effects, and opening and closing credits. Perfect!

Now what? How will you share it with others?

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Here are some general tips that can help you build a better slideshow.

Download Photo to Movie and try out these techniques.

Read more to find out about narrative/plot, music and sound, effective effects, titles, and pacing.

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You already know that Photo to Movie can be used for slideshows. Did you also know you can use it to assemble your timelapse sequences into a video that you can put on DVD or upload to YouTube?

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We frequently get questions from Photo to Movie users asking how to better manage a slideshow with hundreds of photos and dozens of songs. So how long should your slideshow be?

Photo to Movie has the capability of making a slideshow that is very short or very long. Your specific use of your slideshow will be the ultimate determinant of your slideshow length — but we offer some simple rules for determine how long to make your slideshow:

• Make your slideshow the length of one song
• Remove low quality photos to shorten the slideshow
• Split longer slideshows into individual, shorter parts
• Guide the viewer to a new subject every 6-12 seconds
• Minimize opening/closing credit sequences

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New release adds Check Media feature and makes reliability improvements.

Since our last newsletter, we updated Photo to Movie 5.0.7 slide show software for both Mac OS and Windows. This release adds an easy way to check for missing photos, music, and other media in your slide show. Use the menu item File > Check Media… This release also fixes a few intermittent crash bugs that we tracked down this month.

If you haven't updated Photo to Movie to 5.0.7 yet, use the menu item Photo to Movie > Check for Updates… (Mac OS) or Help > Check for Updates… (Windows). You can also download directly from our website. And if you have trouble with the automatic update, remember that you can download the latest version directly from our website.

In December we introduced you to Motion Pictures 3. Based on feedback from you, we decided to rename Motion Pictures 3 to Photo to Movie Express, an easy step-by-step way to quickly produce a slide show. Renaming the product allows us to represent the tight integration with Photo to Movie.

Today we released Motion Pictures 3.0 for public testing. The new version is a re-envisioning of Motion Pictures to make it easier to use and more powerful at the same time. Produce stylish HD slide shows in minutes with step-by-step interface. Fast and astonishingly easy!

You can read more about the new version, including a quick step-by-step tutorial on the main page for the product.

Click here to learn about Motion Pictures 3

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Photo to Movie 5 gives you an easy way to make great looking slide shows. Within just a few minutes, you can add a color texture background for your slide show, a light frame, and a shadow behind your photos. Combined with a layout such as the Collage layout, you can have a great looking slide show.

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Photo to Movie 5 gives you new capabilities to control how your photos are displayed. One of these capabilities is the ability to precisely control the aspect ratio of the key frames on your photo. This allows you to display portrait photos in a way that lets you see the entire photo. Used in conjunction with the layouts provided by Photo to Movie 5, such as the grid layout, you can create some outstanding slide show presentations.

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Taking photos of your children, your friend's and relative's children, or professionally can be a tricky business. They move at a fast pace and aren't always cooperative with your demands for the perfect shot. In this short list, we give you 10 ways to make your kid photography better. Practice will make you better, but you can improve even more by following some simple rules.

A good set of photos will make it easier to make a great looking slide show with Photo to Movie.

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Photo to Movie now includes all of these outstanding features:

• Photo Layouts Display your photos in interesting configurations such as grids and collages.
• Photo Effects Add spectacular visual effects to your photos.
• Motion Effects Smoothly focus on the specific parts of your photos.
• Backgrounds Backgrounds help add style and emotion to your slide show.
• Music and Sound Include the perfect music, sound effects, and narration.
• Titles and Graphics High quality, unlimited titles. Title effects. Embed graphics.
• Transitions Smoothly transition from one photo to the next using 20+ built-in transitions.
• HD 1080p Rendering Unparalleled smooth output with no aliasing. HD, DVD, web and more.

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We get asked this question frequently on our tech support email address, so we thought we’d give a quick tip on how to fit your photos to the duration of your music.

You can automatically stretch on shrink the duration of the photo portion of your movie to match the duration of the audio portion of your movie.

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Here are some tips and techniques for telling a good story with your slide show.

Narrative/Plot

Choose a narrative to build your show around. This can be, and often is, solely according to linear time, but there are other ways to do it. If you have multiple subjects, tell each persons story in order, or follow one person into a big event, and another person away from it. Remember, the story is what actually happened, the plot is the way in which you choose to tell that story.

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We still get a lot of questions and many users have confusion over what video formats to use when presenting an HD slide show — either on an HDTV or on the web. So we thought that this month we would summarize the advantages and disadvantages of the various formats, when to use them, and try to answer a few other questions along the way.

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Have you lost your Photo to Movie license key? We can send you your latest license key to the email under which you original purchased or registered.

To retrieve your Photo to Movie (or Motion Pictures) license keys, visit our website and enter your email address:

Recover Lost License Keys

We also offer other support for using Photo to Movie on our newly redesigned Training and Support web page:

Photo to Movie Training and Support

Have you ever wanted to create a nice opening or closing credits screen for your slide show? Some recently introduced features in Photo to Movie give you a lot of flexibility to make a dynamic professional opening or closing credits screen.

We provide two short tutorials to show you how to use titles for opening and closing credits in your slide show.

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Sergio Messina is an Italian artist. Recently he produced a series of video called “Lettere Moderne.”

His video “Stufa di tutto” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFu5QIWiJ5A) won the first mention at the Videominuto festival last September (http://www.videominuto.it). It’s a recorded phone call of a woman complaining about the world. It’s in Italian, but still worth watching even if you don’t speak the language.

The whole series is made exclusively with Photo to Movie (and Photoshop), using only a fraction of its possibilities, as the rules of this project are very strict: no photos, three colors, one font (always caps), three transitions. Yet more evidence of the complex and varied results you can get using this software.

More at http://www.sergiomessina.com.

This month we released Photo to Movie 4.7, which now includes support for video clips in the timeline.

Currently, Photo to Movie 4.7 is only available on Mac OS. We expect to have a Windows version available soon.

This is a free update for anyone who has license key purchased since September 2009. If your license key is older, you can upgrade to the new version for $29.95 here:

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IT Enquirer posted a review of Photo to Movie this month. IT Enquirer delivers information, market analyses and other resources that help all types of publishers –book, magazine, corporate and technical– achieve greater profits.

Here is the Photo to Movie review:

Review: Photo to Movie 4.6

Great Family Photo Slideshows called Photo to Movie “The Best Slideshow Software for You Just Might Be Photo To Movie”. Read their review here:

The Best Slideshow Software for You Just Might Be Photo To Movie

MyMac.com gives Photo to Movie 8 out of 10 stars and says “This is a fun application that will help you make slideshows that your friend’s will want to watch!”. Read their review here:

Review – Photo to Movie

You’ve got all these photos from the summer. Now take them and make them into a slide show that you can be proud of.

Grab your favorite photos and follow these easy steps to make a slide show that will preserve the memories of summer 2010 forever.

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Are you able to present Photo to Movie to your local MUG or other user group?

We’re always looking for knowledgeable users to present Photo to Movie at local MUGs and other user groups. We can supply you with a free copy of Photo to Movie to give away, a user group discount, brochures, CD’s, and other material for your presentation.

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Are you an educator? Photo to Movie is used in classrooms everywhere as an easy media production tool. Students of all ages can use Photo to Movie for basic video projects.

• Story telling and informational presentations
• Titling, audio, and narration
• Visual composition on a timeline
• Video, DVD, and web publishing, including YouTube
• Book reports, science projects, and more

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Photo to Movie 4.6 introduces graphic objects to the Photo to Movie timeline. A graphic can be used to add a logo to your slide show, add more complex text than what Photo to Movie’s built-in text system supports, or add other types of adornments to your slide show.

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Photo to Movie has always paid extra careful attention to getting colors correct when rendering movies. After all, a deep red or bright blue in your original photo should appear as such in the resulting video, right?

Unfortunately, things are never that easy. With color management, everybody has their finger in the pie and sorting out problems can be difficult.

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Photo to Movie 4.6 includes some great new features. Here is a quick run down of the new features. We’ll cover these features in more detail in upcoming newsletters.

• YouTube Upload. Added YouTube panel to Make Movie dialog.
• iDVD Integration. Added iDVD panel to Make Movie dialog (Mac OS only).
• Graphic Objects. Added ability to add graphics similar to how titles are added.
• Title Linking. Added ability to link titles and graphic objects to specific photos.
• Photo Labels. Added ability to automatically label all photos with name, date, time, etc.
• Title Editing. Added ability to change font and color of multiple titles at once.
• Title Alignment. Added ability to align multiple titles or graphic objects to each other.
• Title Backgrounds. Added a panel for setting title backgrounds.

Photo to Movie 4.5 produces video sized according to the settings in Document Info. Most of the time the video is either 4:3 (standard) or 16:9 (wide screen).

Usually, your photos fill the entire area of the video — that is: the photos extend out to the edge of the video.

With Photo to Movie 4.5, you can control the portion of the output video that is used for the photos. This makes it easy to set the video back 5% or 10% for title safety. This was not possible in earlier versions of Photo to Movie.

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Photo to Movie 4.5 is a major upgrade for Windows users, and brings some great new functionality for Mac users too.

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Photo to Movie has always included a feature called adaptive blurring for reducing flickering/flashing in your movie due to aliasing effects.

Slow motion on photos with lots of detail such as a photo of a tree or water from a distance exhibit this problem most severely.

In the past, adaptive blur processing had to be enabled on a document-wide basis. Photo to Movie 4.5 will include the ability to control this processing on a photo by photo basis.

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Spring is a great time to get your camera outside for some outdoor photography. A hike is a relaxing way to try out your photography skills and when you return, you can use Photo to Movie to put together a slide show of your photos.

Here are some brief tips to remember when doing outdoor photography:

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Who hasn’t been touched by the outpouring of aid going to Haiti? We help because it’s the right thing to do–and because we hope that others would come to our help, if we ever needed it. And that’s a good thing, not just for those in need, but for us. Volunteer activity allows us to connect with where we live, to forge the bonds of friendship and mutual respect that transform a collection of houses into a neighborhood, and a collection of people into a community.

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Web publishing can be tricky business, requiring much trial and error to arrive at a perfect file. There are several things that make web publishing difficult, but the primary issues are the video file format, the bandwidth required to play the video, and the video size. All of these issues are related. For instance, larger video sizes require more bandwidth and take longer to download.

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Halloween is a classic American kid’s holiday, full of mischief, dress-up, and candy. In recent years, however, this night of fun has spread much more; both to adults, and to other countries. We love Halloween, and as such we’d like to offer suggestions on how to use Photo to Movie to spook up your Halloween, whether you’re a parent, a child, or a fun-loving adult.

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Here are some tips and techniques for telling a good story with your slide show.

Narrative/Plot

Choose a narrative to build your show around. This can be, and often is, solely according to linear time, but there are other ways to do it. If you have multiple subjects, tell each persons story in order, or follow one person into a big event, and another person away from it. Remember, the story is what actually happened, the plot is the way in which you choose to tell that story.

Read More »

For many of us–parents, students, teachers–September is back to school time. It’s exciting, but it can be a bit daunting, too. How to keep things exciting and fresh is a challenge for teachers–and how to keep up the GPA is a challenge for students. But Photo to Movie is a tool that can help with that. You’re only limited by your imagination–assemble visual essays, record interviews, create photo comic strips, or a simply make a slide show to supplement your lecture.

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Photo to Movie can easily produce HD quality videos. With HD quality video, you can:

• Burn it to a Blu-ray disk
• Upload it to video sites such as YouTube
• Play it directly in your media center computer
• Edit it further in applications such as Final Cut

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If you’re planning to attend or have already been two a summer wedding, here are some tips and techniques for planning that wedding slide show.

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A graduation is a time to celebrate the hard work of school and the completion of a goal. This article will help you think of ways to commemorate that event with a slide show using Photo to Movie.

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Photo to Movie 4.2 (Mac OS) introduced title effects. In this section, we’ll take a look at title effects and other title basics. With the exception of the title effects, everything in this article applies to both Mac OS and Windows versions of Photo to Movie.
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Photo to Movie includes the ability to add music or narrative voice to your slide shows. It also includes the ability to do basic audio editing. In this tutorial, we’ll cover a few more complicated types of editing:

• Cross fading from one song to the next in the middle of the song
• Silencing part of a song during a voice over.

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