Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"Add a sophisticated and contemporary twist to your shows with the new ProShow StylePack Volume 2. Created for Producer users, this volume features a diverse collection of 25 high-impact, pre-designed Styles."

If photo slideshows are your thing, the software that Photodex makes - ProShow - is pretty much the gold standard on the Windows platform. Photodex has just released StylePack 2 ($19.95 USD) for ProShow Producer, their high-end professional version. I particularly like Juxtapose and Printblend in the video above - both of them are elegant and beautiful when combined with the right images. Old Film Projector would lend itself nicely to some creative presentation. Be sure to check out the second part of this video to see the other effects that are included.

"The ProShow StylePack Volume 1 provides you with dozens of high-quality Slide Styles; 15 for ProShow Gold and 25 for ProShow Producer. Take a look at the samples below to see examples of each Slide Style included in this StylePack."

The video is pretty self-explanatory: this StylePack upgrade to ProShow Gold or ProShow Producer adds a bunch of really slick effects into the mix, sure to spice up any photo slide you create with it. Be sure to check out the list of which effects are available for which product - two of my favourite ones, Silk Screen and Growing Into Focus, are Producer-only effects.

Animoto is easily the most sophisticated, yet easy to use, online slideshow tool I've yet seen. I took it for a spin over the weekend, and if you like the idea of feeding your photos to a service and having it crank out an insanely cool looking music video, then this is the service for you.



The process is really simple - you upload your photos through a Flash-based uploader (which I didn't think was actually possible), and once those are uploaded you move on to the music step. You can either upload a music file off your own computer (and they encourage you to respect the copyright of artists), or you can pick from amongst their surprisingly nice selection of music. In the final stage, where it explains what step of the process it's on, and - this is great - they offer you video trailers and movie news in a sidebar that you can click on while you wait. That put a smile on my face because it's such a nice touch. Here's how my video turned out... Read more...