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Photo to Movie is the deluxe ginsu knife set of digital slideshows, for when iPhoto and iMovie just won't cut it. With it, you can drag images from iPhoto or the Finder into a timeline, reorder them, set their duration, create a multitude of transitions and create complex "Ken Burns"- style zooming, panning and rotation. You create soundtracks using MP3, AAC or AIFF audio files and record your voiceover narration with an internal or external mic. With audio files, you can set start and stop points and fade ins and outs. A title track lets you add any amount of overlapping text titles and have them fade in or out. However, we'd prefer to have motion paths for the titles, too. When finished, you can export your movie to a variety of formats for DVD burning, importing to iMovie or sending over email.
Picture motion is Photo to Movie's greatest asset. You can create much more elaborate Ken Burns effects than in iMovie, with unlimited panning and zooming, wild bezier curve motions and fully rotational spinning. The numerous transitions are fun, too. Images can crossfade, wipe, zoom, slide into one another and more, plus you can set the duration and other options for each transition. We also like the Cube transition (which looks like the Fast User Switching in Panther).
If your iMovies have lots of still images, you can make a much more professional-looking movie in Photo to Movie and then import it back into iMovie. Use presets for quick jobs, but be prepared to spend some time mousing around if you want to customize really cool motions and transitions. The program is rather slow with certain operations even on robust Macs, and some interface quirks (the timeline doesn't scroll when you try to drag elements forward and back, there are not enough keyboard shortcuts, etc.) can also slow you down. Regardless, Photo to Movie can inspire documentarians of any level to do better things with photobased movies.
–MARKKUS ROVITO
Photo to Movie 3.1
LQ Graphics | www.lqgraphics.com | $50
Pros: Ken Burns effect is much more powerful than in iMovie, small learning curve, many cool transitions, voice recording can overlap music in the audio track, dock icon shows export progress, AAC audio file support.
Cons: Runs rather slowly even on an iMac G5, needs more keyboard shortcuts, no title key frames, a few interface shortcomings.
Requires: OS 10.2 or higher, G4 400Mhz, 256MB RAM
macHOME recommends: G4 1.25Ghz or faster, 512MB RAM
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