Proshow Producer allows photographers to easily create multimedia slide shows for DVDs. Furthermore, this software enables them to add menus into the output file for easy navigation.
Avoiding changes to overall slide time via clicking on the Slide Options screen’s Slide Time button is vital when creating slide motion effects as doing so can disrupt all your hard work to set precise movements.
Photo and video editing
Proshow Producer offers all the same features found in other slide show software: you can easily combine images and video clips in a slide show presentation. Video clips are displayed sequentially like images while some limited adjustments can be made within the program itself. Furthermore, Proshow Producer supports an assortment of music files as accompaniment for your slideshow, along with basic text editing capabilities.
Alongside traditional photo effects, this program includes an impressive library of professionally designed templates to quickly and effortlessly create stylish slideshows.
Proshow Producer now allows users to add custom images as backgrounds for slides. This feature can help emphasize important points or simply add visual interest and variety to their presentation.
This program’s timeline-based user interface allows for effortless photo and video clip editing by simply dragging-and-dropping them on top of one another in their order of appearance in your finished presentation. In addition, a dedicated audio track can be edited as background music is supported via wave form display.
For photos, the program provides basic editing features like vignette effects and Hollywood-style green screen effects to adjust contrast, brightness and saturation levels as well as red eye removal and sharpening features. In addition, red-eye removal and photo sharpening tools are also provided in addition to these editing features.
When creating a slide show, the program provides a default safe zone that won’t be cut off when displayed on television, according to extensive research by its developers.
The program allows the user to choose between two movement speeds for zooming and panning – Smooth (faster movement near starting and ending points of the motion), or Linear (uniform throughout duration of movement).
Proshow Producer has been upgraded to import and render video at an even faster pace than previous versions, up to three times faster for video import and one and a half times quicker for rendering.
Transitions
Proshow Producer features a library of pre-made transitions that can be used to transition between slides. These transitions can either be used as-is or modified according to personal tastes; adjustments can also be made to customize your slide show further by adding vignettes, colorizing images and animating text, text animations as well as motion effects such as zooming, panning and rotating effects. Furthermore, Proshow allows you to create menus which appear when the project is played back.
The main workspace screen for a slide show displays each slide’s image with controls at the bottom to play, stop, and adjust its settings. A panel on the left lists each caption and layer for that slide while Layer Settings allow users to set properties such as duration for display and transition type between slides; additionally a waveform for accompanying soundtrack can also be found below Layer Settings panel.
By double-clicking a slide, the Slide Options screen with options for creating motion sequences appears. Motion effects will apply to every copy of an image used on slides in a motion sequence – for instance a three step sequence might use different slides for holding, zooming and panning the image.
Proshow uses keyframes to set the position of each frame for a given period, and display their movements on screen using a timeline. A line with keyframe markers identifies where an image currently stands with regards to where it should appear in terms of keyframe placement in time – these keyframes can also be moved easily by dragging. Furthermore, current frames are highlighted with white outlines for clarity purposes.
By clicking “Lock slide time to prevent changes” in the Slide Options screen, users can lock their slide timing. This feature can be useful when extensive work has been put into precise movements for their slides; however, transition times may still change even with this lock enabled, potentially altering keyframe times as a result of possible keyframe time shifts between transitions.
Audio
ProShow Producer, like most slide show software packages, allows images, audio files and video clips to be combined together into an engaging slide show presentation. Furthermore, Proshow Producer supports some limited adjustments of media files; video clips can be sped up and slowed down while transitions between clips may also be created. Furthermore, multiple soundtracks and fading between clips is supported as well as supporting transitions from one clip to the next.
Proshow Producer slideshows can be played on either a computer or DVD player, and either full screen window viewing, smaller viewer view, zooming-in on specific points of interest, automatic or manual advancement using the space bar, PageDown/PageUp buttons, left mouse button, and Esc key can all be used to navigate smoothly through the slideshow.
A slideshow can be shown with or without sound; an individual slide may feature its own individual soundtrack for effects and narration that apply only to that slide, while an overall track may serve as background music or narration.
An audio timeline display can help to shed more light on the soundtrack of a slide show. When active, a larger waveform for audio will be displayed over each slide and editing can be accomplished by clicking and dragging on control points within the timeline – middle point can be moved out to exclude certain segments while upper/lower points can fade in or out audio clips as desired.
Change the settings for a slide show by accessing the Show Options screen and using its controls to make changes on this page. By default, DVD with TV system of NTSC for North America should be selected with audio type MP2 as its audio type setting. Anti-flickering and desaturation adjustments can also be checked before starting a show.
Output
Proshow Producer offers users a host of output features to deliver slideshows to PCs or burn them onto DVD and Blu-ray for use, upload to YouTube or SmugMug for upload, create a screensaver version for use online or even podcast versions – as well as supporting multiple device sizes for playback.
When creating a motion sequence, it is critical that transition times between slides do not exceed the duration of one image per step – this helps prevent “jumping” or fuzziness during motion sequences. To accomplish this goal, duplicate slides containing identical images should be used at every step in order to prevent “jumping”. This step becomes even more crucial if using slideshows on TV screens.
Proshow Producer makes creating motion effects simpler by offering multiple keyframes per effect. Each keyframe can be placed along a slide’s time line and its image displayed alongside its timeline marker on screen – increasing this number will produce smoother, more natural-looking effects when they play back on television screens.
An MPEG-2 encoded video slideshow can significantly improve its quality when used instead of the default MPEG-4 for video encoding, especially on high resolution TVs with higher frame rates. Desaturation and anti-flicker options further improve viewing pleasure on these televisions by eliminating flicker which appears when images contain high contrast levels.
ProShow Presenter plug-in is used when making slide shows for the internet, to play back its special file for internet delivery that contains its specifications. This.px file holds media files necessary for display as well as timing, transitions, motion, text etc. In contrast to an executable program which would need thousands of rendered images for video output; Presenter generates these while playing it back on a computer.
