Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

Well, it's now official: ProShow Web has launched. I've played around with it a bit, creating a video and downloading the 1080p version of it (I got a Premium-level account to check out the whole service), and overall I'm quite impressed. They've managed to take the sometimes hard-to-understand parts of Proshow Producer and simplified it to the point where anyone can make an impressive slideshow. If you're a casual home user, the $30/year fee is definitely worth it if you're a keen photographer looking for new ways to share your photos with friends and family.

The one down side: it's only DVD (480p) resolution on the video downloads. ProShow seems to have wanted to match what Animoto offers, which I think is a shame....I think any paid service not offering 720p video at minimum is missing the mark. That's my opinion at least - what's yours? Would you pay $30/year for 480p video downloads?

The list of what's new in ProShow Gold 4.1 is quite extensive - they've added the ability to upload directly to Facebook and Vimeo, and announce the show via Twitter at the same time. They've significantly improved the slide style interface, group styles into logical collections, which makes finding slide styles easier. Unfortunately, the two most irritating things about apply slide styles remain intact: first, that you can't apply a slide style to a group of photos at once, and second, that every time you apply a slide style, you get a pop-up warning asking you to confirm the slide style change. That means if you have a slide show with 50 slides, you're going to have to click 100+ times to get the same slide style applied to each photo. I really like this software, but I don't understand how a product aimed at professionals (Producer) isn't more streamlined in terms of workflow. Every click saved helps!

"The wait is over! The all-new ProShow StylePack Volume 3 is here and is our most stylish and creative StylePack yet! Created for Producer users, this volume features a diverse collection of 25 high-impact, pre-designed Styles. Slide Styles instantly transform your slides into amazing effects and animations. With just a few clicks you can go from ordinary to extraordinary! Check out the new Styles below and see more online."

These impressive effects are strictly for the professional-grade ProShow Producer ($249 USD), but if you're a photographer making money creating slideshows for your clients, that's a small price to pay to have an impressive tool at your disposal. The fact that these stylepacks are only $19.95 is great - each one is packed with some great effects. I really liked the Chroma Wash and Oscillations effects from the first video - and Sum of the Parts is pretty slick as well! Tilt Matrix on the second video looks great as well.

I used ProShow Producer a couple of weeks ago on a quick project, and the end results were superb - though I'm still irked that I can't select all my images and apply the same slide style to each of them, all at once. Having to click on each image, click to apply the slide style, and then click OK on a dialogue box warning me that I'm changing the slide style is truly tedious when you have to do it 34 times in a row. Still, I've never seen a program so finely tuned for turning photos into video slide shows - it's a truly superb tool.