CNET Editors' review
Custom slideshows are a great way to display your favorite photos and videos to friends and family. PhotoStage Slideshow Producer shows that slideshow makers don't need to be difficult to use to produce great results.
The best sign of a well-designed user interface is when you can jump into a program without having to consult the help feature first. PhotoStage Slideshow Producer has just such an interface. However, should you need it; a link to an ample online Help page is available. PhotoStage's process is broken down into steps so you can't go wrong. We started first by adding our media files, which included a mix of digital photos and a video. From there, we were able to add effects to each file, including the ability to crop, resize, and change the hue. But you can take it all a step further and add effects that turn your images into old film, oil paintings, negatives, sepia, and more. Our next step was to add transitions, such as Cross Fade, Revealing From Top to Bottom, and so on. We were pleasantly surprised to find that PhotoStage offers a narration feature that let us add our own music to our slideshow; you can even record your own voice, if you have a microphone. The Save step gave us numerous options for saving our newly created slideshow, including saving it as a Flash file, DVD movie, or a data disc, or we could save it to our hard drive or portable device. We saved our slideshow to our desktop. It took a few seconds for it to save, but in no time, we were able to play our newly created slideshow back.
PhotoStage Slideshow producer will appeal to users of all skill levels. It installs desktop icons without your permission, but it uninstalls cleanly. We highly recommend it.
Publisher's Description
From NCH Software:
Create a slide show from your digital photos and videos on Windows and apply effects such as fade, cross fade, and zoom. Burn your slide show to DVD for playback on TV, or as a standalone video file for enjoying on web and portable devices. Add a soundtrack, narrative or text captions to further enhance your memories. Touch up or enhance your photos and videos with ease. Transition effects: panning and zooming effects let you bring your photos to life; fade transition effect gives your slide show that professional touch; preview the effects in real time; customize the duration of the effect. Photo optimization: fine tune brightness, saturation and color for photos and video; add your favorite photos with a click of a button; crop, rotate, and flip photos easily and preview the changes in real time; add text captions to individual slides; add video clips for a complete slide show presentation. Audio Tools: add music tracks to your slide show.
What's new in this version: Version 2.13 improved Quick Create and DVD playback features and other performance updates.
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All versions:
3.4 starsout of 42 votes
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Current version:
3.1 starsout of 13 votes
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My rating:
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"Pretty Good"
Version: PhotoStage Slideshow Producer 2.13
Pros
Very simple to use.
Bulk editing of the view time and the transition timing so that you can match the slideshow to the length of songs or voice over is great.Cons
Didn't work on a cheap DVD player. That may have been the DVD player even though I had the correct settings set to burn the disk on the program and checked the settings on the DVD player.
If you have a lot of photo's that do not have a descriptive file name it can be time consuming to drag and drop them in the right order after loading them as they are in one long strip at the bottom. While you can manipulate the strip to see more slides at a time and can select mutliple slides at a time it was by far the longest process in setting up the whole show. Being able to cut and paste or being able to see more of the slide show in an expanded window would make organising easier.Summary
Had to put together a funeral memorial in a couple of hours with over 100 photos and three songs for a 10 minute viewing. Very easy to pick up the navigation.
Worked like a charm on a decent DVD player using PAL format in Australia. Also worked well in WMP and VLC when saved on thumb drive -
"Thought it was good at first, then I tried to render it"
Version: PhotoStage Slideshow Producer 2.13
Pros
Easy, perfect, until you try to save it
Cons
When you try to render it in any form or upload it, it just doesn't work and crashes...
Summary
Fix your program developers!
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"A major warning about this program!"
Version: PhotoStage Slideshow Producer 2.13
Pros
I really liked this program at first, and even recommended it to a few friends; however, there is a major bug with it that is imo unforgivable.
An alternative application to this that can make nice slide shows and is fairly intuitive is: PhotoFilmStrip. I'll talk about it more in the summery.Cons
NHC does not just install this nice little application, but they also install usage spyware that will randomly pop up a message to try and install one of their other apps for dealing with a given problem. Many are easily dodge-able; however, this morning while waking up I got nailed unexpectedly by a random pop dialog that I was not expecting and wound up with Express zip, an app that is redundant, and removes one of my favorite features of windows, and now is going to be a royal pain to fix.
Most people don't realize that as of xp and beyond windows comes with a built in zipping utility. Thus there is no need for a third party app as it is redundant. Most third party unzipping apps also add additional steps to the process. The most annoying part about these apps is once they break the systems built in zip archiver, they do not repair it when they uninstall. So you have to go through a very annoying process to fix the damage they do for something you don't need.Summary
I like this app, but when I select extract files here using the systems built in dearchiver after having this application installed for over two weeks in which time I have unzipped at least 5-10 other items did their pop up suddenly decide that this was the time to ask if I wanted their product? More importantly, why when I was already using a dearchiver, and was in the process of launching the dearchiver did it decide to randomly pop up. Simple, they were hoping I would accidentally install their application, which BTW I only did because I was tired and miss clicked. For that I'm now punished with spending a few hours fixing something that wasn't broken until their spyware installer snuck this in.
Quick addition, a cropped pan can also be used for doing photo zooms, and if you are after that functionality which PhotoFilmstrip has greater precision with.
PhotoFilmsStrip can also be found here on Cnet downloads, and if you are mainly interested in doing slide shows with fades and pans, it's actually much more intuitive than this application, and can do cropped pans with greater precision. The downside is it only does photo slide shows, so if you want video cut in you'll have to mix it with another application like windows movie maker, Vegas, Lightworks (overkill but now free) or what ever.
Updated on Jan 7, 2012
Updated on Jan 7, 2012Adding one more tid bit for those who found them selves in this same situation. Here is how you fix the zip association problem:
1. In the run dialog type:
cmd /c assoc .zip=CompressedFolder
2. If you are running windows XP also do the following:
A. in the run dialog type:
REGSVR32 ZIPFLDR.DLL
B1. Then with a folder open click the Tools menu and select Folder options.
B2. In the folder options click the , "File Types" tab.
B3. Scroll through the Registered File types till you get to, "ZIP" and select it.
B4. Under, "Details for 'ZIP' extension" there shoould be a button marked, "Restore" click it.
B5. Reboot your computer.
3. (Optional) As a bonus, if you are really spiteful and feel comfortable with modifying the system registry (Can be dangerous so do it at your own risk), go through the registry and delete every key that contains, "ExpressZip" -
"99% Amazing, 1% Horrible"
Version: PhotoStage Slideshow Producer 2.13
Pros
Simple, powerful, easy to use/learn, very flexible, lots of cool features/effects, include your fav music files!
Cons
1. The program reorders the imported images according to their file name, not according to the order in which you import them. So, when adding picture files to the program, if you want to keep them in a specific order, you need to do some up-front work in your file naming convention. See summary below for example.
2. When previewing your slideshow prior to creation, the video is compressed, and appears pixellated. However, the finished product (if you can get it to finish) was high-definition just like my photos.
3. Program would NOT compile a slideshow to any file format!!Summary
I love this software! It is free, and simple to use. It uses your still-pictures and allows you to put them in any order, choosing a separate display time for each image, and a separate transition for each image, and multiple various effects for each image. The effects are not cheesy either. For example, you can zoom out a picture starting in the upper right hand corner (or any portion of the image) and expanding to show the entire picture (or any portion of the image), while simultaneously applying effects (like automatic color hue changes for example) and slide transitions (like page turns or many others). It is a really powerful, free program.
I put together a 6 minute video complete with music. I simply dragged a song from my iTUNES library and dropped it into the PhotoStage gui. It imported the audio file seamlessly. Then, I was able to align the picture display times with the music transitions so that the pictures changed as the intro, verse, chorus, etc of the song changed. This is done manually, which takes some time, but I don't know any other way to do it. Finally, I took a bunch of still pictures of my son playing his toy guitar and put them in a fast sequence to make it look like a choppy video. I had about 50 pictures that were sequentially displayed for only 0.1 seconds each. When put together in sequence it looked hilarious along with the music, and I loved it! Also, the program has a "duplicate slide" feature which came in handy! It duplicates the image as well as any assigned effect and transition!
After reading one review I realized that the naming of each picture file is important. So, I renamed all the picture files that I wanted to use with a letter and a number. For example, "A1, A2..." for the first set and "B1, B2..." for the second set, etc. This took some time, but worked well and allowed the program to keep my files in my order. If you have more than ten files in your "set" you will want to start over with a new alpha-numeric file name. Otherwise, the program will reorder them as "A1, A10, A2, A3...".
It would be an awesome feature to "tag" the music file in certain time positions which would indicate musical transitions. This would make life easier when trying to align the pictures to the music. But, I was still able to do it manually without too much effort.
Here is the 1% horrible part. After spending 2-3 hours creating a 6-minute slideshow complete with transitions, effects, music, etc, I could NOT get the program to properly create the end product. I tried creating a DVD, didn't work. I tried creating a CD-Data file, didn't work. I tried creating a Computer-Data file, didn't work. Each time I tried to finalize the slideshow, the program begins to convert the video and it shows a percentage of completion. The completion percentage would go from 0 to 65% and get hung up. I retried it and it went from 0 to 97% and hung up. It showed a "program not responding" error in the pop-up window. I tried multiple times changing the format type (DVD, CD, data, etc) and also changing the file type (HDTV, widescreen TV, and others) and each time it would hang up during the video conversion. This was extremely frustrating. There was one time that the program actually created a CD file. I was amazed that it finished! However, when I played it back in Windows Media Player there were portions of my slideshow that did not display. The music always played correctly, but the video went blank in certain spots. I traced the bad video portions back to my slideshow and found that whenever I used the "Old Film" feature (which is really cool) the finalized product screwed up and the video went black. It would stay black for a few more slides after this effect was turned off, and then recover.
All in all, this is an amazing program! Free! Lots of cool, useful features and transition effects. Simple to use! Complete with music! Well thought out gui and low learning curve! However, it would not "compile" for me. I am sure the coders will eventually fix this major error in future versions. (I am using a new Dell Laptop with Windows XP, lots of RAM, lots of hard drive space, lots of computing power. I seriously doubt my problems were due to my computer's resource limitations). -
"minimal learning curve, easy editing"
Version: PhotoStage Slideshow Producer 2.13
Pros
easy maneuvering
Cons
reformatting of files for DVD burning
Summary
few bells and whistles, but sound product for basic video editing
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"its a good combination of photostory and movie maker"
Version: PhotoStage Slideshow Producer 2.13
Pros
simple
deals well with photos and video
useful upload to youtube
freeCons
its not proffessional but then again its free
Summary
i reccemend it
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"Fantastic Product! Very Intuitive to use-Great Results!"
Version: PhotoStage Slideshow Producer 2.13
Pros
I loved working with this program. I found it very intuitive and fun to work with.
Because it is so visual, it made it easy to understand.
I used it to edit a video application for the Amazing Race, if my son and I get chosen, it will be in large part to this program!Cons
My only con is that I had trouble getting my last video clip to work properly after downloading it into the program. The visual was not syncing up with the sound.The sound was ending about 2/3 of the way through the video and then the visual continued in silence.
After spending many (maybe 8) hours trying to get this clip to work, re-download it, etc. My son said something about how sometimes the sound can use less space than the visual.
This made me think about checking the setting on the camera used to take all the clips. It turns out that the camera had been accidentally set to the highest quality setting (1080p) instead of the setting where all the other clips had been shot at (720p).
This caused the visual side of the clip to be far larger than the audio. Once I found the problem, I was able to re-size the clip in my Prism Video File Converter to a size that worked.Summary
I will continue to recommend this program.
My only suggestion would be to let users know in a conspicuous place the range of video camera settings that are compatible with the program. -
"I wasted my money"
Version: PhotoStage Slideshow Producer 2.13
Pros
Making the video is flexible and intuative but ...
Cons
... I cant get it to save anywhere in any format. Really disappointed. No possibility of getting assistance from the provider. Just can't get it to work and feel very disappointed.
Summary
Creating part works so well and is clear but if you can't save it it's not much use. Also the forums are not much used but also report this same problem. They should add information about how to solve this problem so we non-techies can use what could otherwise be a nice thing.
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"Wouldn't work for me."
Version: PhotoStage Slideshow Producer 2.13
Pros
There were none.
Cons
Simply did not work.
Summary
After I burned my disc it locked my Windows Media Player up 4 or 5 times while I was trying to play it. Also, it would not play in any of my DVD players.
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"Incredible!"
Version: PhotoStage Slideshow Producer 2.13
Pros
Very small install size and easy to load
Stable, even on my very old, low spec PC.
Burns to DVD effortlessly, in about 3 hours for a 90 min slideshow.
Quality of slideshow on automatic for DVD size was brilliant.
very intuative.
This was all with the FREE version, which is FREEWARE!! There appears to be no limitations or watermarks etc!Cons
Adding text is quite restrictive - locks on to a slide and you can't change the size.
Summary
Absolutley blown away with how good this FREE program is.
Very good quality slideshows that work first time, and very easy and quick to produce too.
Couldn't ask for more from a free program. Thank you!!
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