Digital Home Thoughts: Photodex Releases ProShow Producer/Gold 4.5

"ProShow Producer has never been this powerful or easy to use. Explore over 190 new transition effects like Page Curl, Curved Path and Camera Flash. Enjoy effortless, automated show creation with the new, built-in wizard and show themes. Plus, add a fresh, exciting look to your shows using any of the 170 new built-in slide styles. Download a free trial today."

I'm a big fan of ProShow Gold and ProShow Producer, but have always struggled with some of the more advanced parts of the program - it's a really powerful product, but certain aspects of the user interface are mystifying and I've never put in the grunt work to figure it all out. Well, with version 4.5, part of that problem is solved. They've added a new wizard for project creation that I can only describe as phenomenal: I was amazed at the result that came from an automated process. I tweaked a few things after the fact, but it was so much easier to tweak than to do it all from scratch. The purists out there might consider this cheating, but I say that the end result is what matters most. Check out two sample videos after the break that I've created that illustrate this.

The above video was created using ProShow Producer 4 from some photos I took at the wedding of two friends - I created the video from scratch, and while the results are nice, and I believe better than your typical slideshow, it doesn't have the "wow" factor I've seen from some other ProShow videos.

I used most of the same photos for the video above, and kept the same song, but used the auto-create wizard in ProShow Producer 4.5 using the Wedding theme, then tweaked four of the transitions and slide styles manually for greater impact. The second video has much more impact in my opinion, and took me about 90% less time to create than the first one. That's what I call a big win!