Create your own DVD slideshow (DVD Photo Slideshow)

Member Name: littlemissdaisy

Product:	DVD Photo Slideshow
Date:	06/01/08 (411 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: easy to use, reasonably cheap

Disadvantages: --

I'm a serious camera/photo nut so when I got my first laptop last year I decided to do a digital photography course at my local college. Among many other things I learned the art of taking and manipulating digital pictures and then displaying them on websites and creating other exciting features - the most exciting of which, for me, was DVD slideshows. At college we used Nero for this purpose, however I wanted something a little more user friendly and a more simplistic interface.

I found this programme among others using a straight forward Google search. I done some research and downloaded a few trial editions. Ease of use was my main priority and I felt that this programme was, by far, the most easy to use.
The programme cost me around £27. I downloaded the programme and installed it onto my computer and I was then emailed a license key which I keyed in. The process was straightforward and completed in fifteen minutes.

My first project was a slideshow DVD of my partners last three birthdays and I completed this very quickly - with hindsight and further practice I could have spent more time perfecting various areas of it but it certainly done the job! I then had a think of what I wanted to do next and decided to do a project spanning the full year and including various albums from nights out and events with my closest friends and partner- which was to be given to my three best friends as part of their Christmas.
At the very top left is the logo and name of the programme you are using. At the very top right are the three steps you work through shown in tab form, these are Organise Photos, Choose Menus and Burn Disk.


*~*~*Organise Photos Tab*~*~*
When the programme is opened the main screen is split into four windows.

The upper left section has the file list that normally appears when you are browsing your documents in Windows and this defaults to the "my photos" section of your computer. You can use your mouse to click through these menus and click onto any of your albums that you already have saved in "my photos" on your hard drive. There is a scroll bar which you can move up and down to view the menu tree. The window can be expanded to take up more of the screen as you wish - as can the other three sections of the main screen.
The upper right section of the screen displays thumbnails of the file that you have selected on the left - this way you can see all of the photos that are in the selected file. Again, this window has a scroll bar on the right to allow you to view all of the photos and this section can have its size changed for ease of viewing. The filename of each photo is displayed underneath each photo.

The bottom left window on the screen is where you create each album that will be shown on your slideshow. The finished product will be similar to a DVD in that it will have multiple menus (if required) and the albums that you create in this section will be the contents of each menu. At the top of the window are two buttons - an "Add" button and a delete button. When you click into "add" a box will appear and will allow you to name your album - these names will become the names of each menu on your DVD - these can be changed later on if you wish.
The bottom right window is where you start really getting down to work - lets call it the work area!! The tabs on this window are: Album Photo, Transition and Music, Album Theme & Album Preview. Each of these areas have further options.

All of the above four areas area easy to work through and self-explanatory, I found that I didn't need to use the help pages and was able to get straight down to it. It really is simple and quite enjoyable!
***Album Photo***
This is where can drag the thumbnail photos you want to add into your slideshow. By now you will have created the albums you want to add to the DVD. When you click onto each album you can then start dragging down photos from the top left window where your thumbnails are. To switch between albums you simply click onto the album/menu you want at the left hand side. There are also tabs within this window for you to start making your DVD look the way you want it to by rotating pictures, adding text and use the auto adjustment to improve the appearance of the photo,

*** Transition & Music***
These options allow you to add music to your slideshows from your own computer or a CD - This can become obsessive! I spent ages trying to decide on the perfect songs for each album I had created, it's a lot of fun though. There are tools which allow you to choose when you want the music to start, to record your own voice, to show you how long the song will go on for, to add even more music and much more!
The transitions menu gives you options for how you want your photos to appear on the screen - this really is fun! You can have them zooming, fading, spinning, have shapes - there are plenty of effects to choose from. In this section you can also decide how long you want each transition to last for. There are a lot of detailed functions within this section - however they are really easy to use.

*** Album Theme***
Here you can add borders and themes to the background of your albums. I found that there weren't many of these themes that I liked and I preferred my photos to just appear on the screen with nothing behind them. However, other people may well find these useful there are borders and themes such as Valentines Day, Mothers Day, Easter and so on and so forth - there are roughly 70 of these themes and there will be something to suit everyone - if you look hard enough!
You can also add titles and credits to each of the menus on your DVD. There is a section you can put some writing which can appear at the start or at the end - or both. When I done my large project I put a "credits section" at the end of the last slideshow, in a scroll style the same as the credits you see on television. This really added an element of humour to the slideshow as well as making it really professional looking. There are lots of templates you can use for the titles and credits - a favourite of mine is the diamond template - really classy!

***Album Preview***
In the album preview section there is a blank screen and at the right hand side you have a play function where you can review what you have done so far. You can then either amend what you have done or move to the next stage.

*~*~*Choose Menus Tab*~*~*
In this section you will decide how your DVD will look when it's put into the DVD player and starts to play - the menu screen. Once burned you can use your DVD remote control to move between the menus the same way you would on a DVD film - its great! The screen for this tab is laid out with a "television screen" in the middle of your monitor - this is where you will see changes that you are making to the layout of your menus. Below this are five smaller tabs and on these are: Background music, background images, Edit, Menu navigator and Preview.

***Background Music***
Another fun music part! In here you get to choose the music that will start playing when you enter your DVD into the player. This music will accompany the menus on the screen. As with the music for the individual slideshows you can upload this music from your computer and it's extremely easy to do.
***Background Images***
As before, there are a great deal of menus to choose from. I found most of these to be quite cheesy and not at all what I would want for my menu but you are able to add your own backgrounds. I found pictures on the internet of champagne flutes, flowers, hearts, plain colour backgrounds and these worked really well for me. All you have to do is save a high quality large picture onto your computer and then there is an "add" button where you can add your picture to become the background for your menu screen. You could even use a photograph! When opting for your own background, you have the option to make this in black and white which looks quite classy.

All of your menus will have a border around them depending on which template has been selected, If you opt to upload your own background, you can still use the borders from the templates by just clicking through them and deciding which goes best with your uploaded background.
***Edit***
Under each menu you will have writing which will show you the name of the album you are about to view - in this section you can change the word, font, size and colour of this text.

***Menu Navigator***
In this section you can decide what happens after a slideshow has been viewed. For example there are options to:
-Return to the mein menu
-Play repeatedly
-Play next album

***Preview***
This is where you finally get to see the full thing! You have a section at the bottom which looks like a DVD remote control and you work this by using your mouse. If you aren't happy you simply go back and tweak!

*~*~*Burn Disk Tab*~*~*
This is where the technical stuff happens. When I first clicked onto this tab to burn my DVD I was a bit nervous at the options but it's actually very simple. You can choose what output format you want - there are options for things such as DVD, VCD, CVCD, MPEG. It can also generate MPEG video files for mobile devices such as iPod, Zune, PSP, PDA, mobile phone, build photo slideshow video ready for upload to YouTube, MySpace.

I'm not familiar with some of these and knew I wanted a DVD - and this is the option it defaults to anyway. For those of you who are more technical-minded, I'm sure you could find uses for the other formats.
On the TV system tab make sure that the PAL button is ticked - unless you want to create a disk for use in Japan or America!

On the DVD/CD recorder options you can decide how many copies you want to burn. You then enter your blank disk and click Burn now. When it has finished creating each copy it will open your drawer and you simply enter your next blank disk, if more than one is required - Voila!

*~*~*My Conclusion*~*~*
I honestly can't recommend this product enough. I worked on my project for my friends over a long time period and certainly put quite a few hours into it - purely because I wanted it to be perfect. I included six photo albums. When I was putting on the music to accompany certain albums I would adjust the timing of the photographs to make sure they were going in time to the music - or I would ensure that certain photos appeared at certain lines in the song - which was certainly a talking point!! I also included a slideshow called "the ones they didn't want you to see" which was essentially an outtakes slideshow. I included all the really bad photos of face making, too much wine, kisses, falls etc....

This is the ideal present to make someone if you have photos spanning back years - or even if you just want to make someone a lovely slideshow with their wedding photos. When I was at college a woman in the class had scanned loads of pictures dating back decades and was planning to make a special DVD for her mothers 80th. There are loads of potential projects!
I now plan to buy a scanner and I'm going to create a slideshow for my friends which will cover out friendships over the years - the hairdos, the fashions, the boys!!! I'm going to ask them all to borrow their albums and include all the photos I can find. I plan, again, to give this to them at Christmas.

To watch a short clip showing the interface and menus I have described, simply to go http://www.dvd-photo-slideshow.com/ad4/howto.html and press play. You can also view the rest of the website here and make your purchase!

Thanks for reading
Sharon x

Summary: Create your own DVD slideshow

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