What is your favorite DVD slideshow software?

[Captain Satellite]

I checked out ProShow Gold and it seems OK. Are there any others I should try before I buy? What do you guys like?

[b1tchm4gn3t]

ProShow Gold is the best I have used.

[Sifaga]

I like/use these

Pros Show Gold
Memoriesontv
and Ulead PictureShow

[jwedge]

ProShow Gold is worthwhile the money...easy to use and pro results. I have Nero but prefer ProShow Gold.

Has anyone used ProShow Producer? It costs more but look the same as Gold

[Timoleon]

A couple of years ago I and my siblings put together a slideshow of over seven thousand photos for our parents 50th wedding anniversary using Ulead DVD Picture Show. Worked out well, with no problems

[ozymango]

I used Pinnacle Studio 8 a while back to make a slideshow DVD of a family trip overseas, and it came out very nicely. But now I use ProShow for doing pictures to DVD just because it's so darn easy. And the quality is excellent.

I'd go with ProShow if you're just looking to do photos (and the occasional video clip) to DVD, because it also offers the ability to do motion effects (like the "Ken Burns" effect) of moving pictures across a screen, zoom in, that kind of stuff. If you don't have any video editor and want to do tape or video editiing as well, you might look into Pinnacle Studio and Ulead Studio, they're also very good (if not as intuitive). But if you're working predominately with still images, I've tried a bunch of different programs and always come back to ProShow.

[greymalkin]

A couple of years ago I and my siblings put together a slideshow of over seven thousand photos for our parents 50th wedding anniversary using Ulead DVD Picture Show. Worked out well, with no problems

man..and i thought my 500 image slideshow was alot to handle. Ok..so if you had a 3 second delay and 2 second transition time that would make the slideshow a little under 9 hours!!!

[hech54]

Ulead for me.

[Mister Flonk-Flonk]

I'm a big fan of the freeware apps. Slide Show Movie Maker for me.

[JimmyJoeBob]

DVDSanta


http://www.dvdsanta.com/

[hech54]

I'm a big fan of the freeware apps. Slide Show Movie Maker for me.

I have used that one in the past as well but the output file size limitation simply sucks.

[Mister Flonk-Flonk]

How hard is it to join AVI files though, really? It's outputting raw files that have to be processed and encoded before the final target format (DVD in most cases) is obtained, so it's really but a minor hinderance, at best.

[kisrum]

most have free trials with a big watermark in the middle of the pictures, but you can at least see what they can do.
I use MOTV because it's what I own. It has some oddities but I'm used to them. Menus are ridiculously primitive but I usually author the result with TDA. Be sure to get the mpeg2 encoder if your outputting to DVD's

Seemed like the Ken Burns effect was a little simpler than with proshow gold.

[Mister Flonk-Flonk]

I use some of the transitions & effects in SSMM to create neat motion menus for my DVDs, and for creating some funky custom transitions to use in my creations.

[Groami Geistalt]

Which slideshow programs offer user control over when one image moves to the next image? I'm amazed at the number I've tried, which don't have that feature. One can set the time in terms of seconds, but the slideshow always works automatically, and that's just odd. I've attended many slide projector presentations, all narrated formally or informally: when the narrator was done discussing the image, the next image would be called manually.
Even DVDAuthor doesn't have that feature in its slide show, and that software is very smart, generally speaking.
(At least DVDAuthor lets met set the time between frames to a very high number and then navigate forwards and backwards with chapter-jump buttons.)

By the way, does anyone know how to bulk-load images into DVDAuthor's slide show frames? I've got a slide show of 350 images, and I'm hoping I don't have to click-drag every one of them.

[dipstick]

I like Premiere. I use it for video anyways, and it can't be beat for slideshows.

Free alternatives would be Wax2, WMM, Virtualdub (using image sequence)...