Soundslides
For journalists who need a really quick tool for putting together a slide show of images and a voiceover, Soundslides is a great solution. It makes SWF (Macromedia Flash) files, together with the HTML needed to display them. Although it does not come with any web hosting services it conveniently exports a folder so that you can upload the show to your server without additional work. It is optimized to work with fewer than 200 images but there is no fixed upper limit.
You need to perform pre-prep on the slides before loading them into Soundslides and you also need to create and edit a soundtrack. A typical journalist's workflow would be to tone, crop and caption the images in Photoshop or another editor; convert them to generic RGB with a longest dimension of 1000 pixels; sharpen; save as JPEG on 12 or Maximum; then finally import them to Soundslides.
A Pro version called Soundslides Plus introduces image movement in the form of panning and zooming; image-only click-through slide shows; individual transitions; built-in lower-third subtitles and built-in thumbnail menus.
Comment
Soundslides is a basic utility, without proper editing facilities for audio, but it produces clean, attractive results very quickly. That is probably why journalists like it so much and why it has become a favorite of media departments in universities. (For audio mixing you can use a FREE utility such as Audacity -- audacity.sourceforge.net).
At the vendor's web site there is a lively forum where you can see many great shows made with the software, plus help and a searchable knowledge base.
Tech info
- OS: Windows 2000 onward; Mac OS X 10.3
- Price level: Approx. $40; Soundslides Plus $70
Soundslides
Developer Joseph Weiss has worked on improving Soundslides since 2005 and he keeps users up-to-date via his posts to the Soundslides forum. He is based in Durham, North Carolina.
From the same vendor:
- Mac & Windows versions of Soundslides
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