Hello forum,
As I understand it, both Adobe Photoshop Elements 6.0 and Premiere Elements 4 are capable of producing slideshows.
My previous experience in slideshow creation was with Microsoft's Photostory, which was useful to a point. It was easy to impose transitions and a pan and zoom effect "slides" but I was unable to include video clips as part of the overall slideshow.
For a time I resorted to a very time consuming process of turning the whole slide show into a series of small video clips so I could turn the slideshow into an MPEG or a WMV or maybe it was VCD? I'm sure I managed to burn one or two CDs - eventually. Each "clip" would represent a segment of the slideshow that would be placed before or after an actual video clip (AVI) that I had shot with my video camera.
So, anyway...
My dream has been to find an all-in-one program where I could drop photographs and videos into a timeline and turn it all into one big slideshow and write it to a DVD.
I bought the Adobe Photoshop 6.0 and Premiere Elements 4 package in the hope this would meet my needs. So far I am unhappy with this Adobe Suite, but realise it is early days and I am still rather new at this software and the whole slideshow/video editing process.
I originally tried to make a slideshow in Premiere Elements but found I could not do decent transitions between "slides" (photographs or AVIs). I also found it hard to set the duration of an individual slide and setting the overall - or default - duration was a bit confusing too. I think each frame/slide was set to 25FPS or something. Anyway, when I found it too hard in Premiere Elements to set up a default transition between "slides" I thought I'd give Photoshop 6.0 a go.
Photoshop 6.0 seemed much easier and more intuitive. I set up a transition and imposed a pan and zoom effect on all the slides in a matter of minutes. It was easy enough to insert slides and multiple MP3s but I was unable to do a fade-out or a fade-in effect when changing music "tracks".
I need easy access to set an individual slide's duration, to have good transitions between "slides" with the ability to easily apply a favoured transition to the whole slideshow, plus more control over the soundtrack, which includes the ability to fade-out or fade-in the audio at will and to equalise the volume level so I can tie it in and make it feel like one smooth soundtrack.
In Photoshop, I can insert and adjust the length of each audio clip but the transition between tracks is very disjointed and the volume all over the place sometimes too loud then too soft and I would like to lower the volume of the soundtrack significantly when an AVI plays, then raise it again when the stills come back on screen.
Wow... it is way too late where I am. Hope you don't mind me cutting it short and picking it up again tomorrow.
At the end of the day all I want to know is what do the more experienced people use for making slideshows? Is it Photoshop or Premiere? Is it a combination of both PE6 and PR4 and if so, which parts of each program do you use for creating dynamic slideshows?
Or perhaps Sony Vegas is the software of choice for the home user? I'm told Sony Vegas is an all-in-one photo, video and audio editing solution and started out as an audio mixer so is pretty damn good in that department.