Slideshow program?

[Avalonthas]

Hi i am interested in a program to make a slideshow of pictures from my Prom and events throughout the year, like a video year book sort of thing.

Essentially all the functionality i would like is the following:
-Able to turn into a DVD movie
- Able to make multiple albums, one for each event, and have one track (mp3) of music per album, and allow me either to sync the slideshow to the music, or make the transition/slides span the entire track, meaning it will auto adjust transition times depending on music length.
- Have it so each album plays after each other preferably seamlessly. My only purpose to the albums is to organize them into each event, thats all.
- Transition effects is prefered but not mandatory for changing between slides.
- Ability for the program to randomly order the pictures so it mixes stuff up (doesnt have to be a different dynamically calculated random each time the movie is played obviously, i just dont want pictures that look similar to be played back to back)
- I also want to add a few videos at the end of the slideshow, they are in .avi format

Thats about it. Pretty simple. If anyone has any good program(s) recommendations please tell me. This is my prom so im willing to pay for it, but i'd obviously prefer freeware if available. Thanks.

I have Cyberlinks PowerProducer but its slightly limited in that it i cant seem to figure out how to have all the albums play back to back seamlessly without going back to the menu. I only want a menu to be there to show a background image and just have a start button, and it wont put my pictures in random order.

[LloydAZ]

Look at DVD Slideshow GUI in the tools section. It's freeware, and works pretty good. There's not much for documentation, but I'm sure you can figure it out.

What you'll probably have to do is compile two different slideshows, then link them together with your authoring program so they play consecutively.

[Avalonthas]

this program u recommend keeps freezing or is extremely slow when im adding my pictures. There is about 800 pictures total at 4 to 6 megapixels each, but im doing it in chunks of 40 and still slow. No other programs had trouble. Any others that will help me?

AMD 3700+
2gigs of ram
250gb seagate
7800GT

[Sifaga]

i have used these

memoriesontv
proshow gold
Ulead dvd pictureshow

[fjmr]

pinnacle studio 9
nero vision express
ulead video studio 8

[dipstick]

Wax2 is a good free one, but it'll only output avi or you can FrameServe to encoder. If you only want static pictures, then DVD-Lab does a great job. It's very fast easy and uses minimal space.

[laspis59]

I like MemoriesOnTV 2.2.1 which allows you to use TMPGEnc Plus 2.5 to encode to MPEG VCD/DVD compliant video files.This encoder gives good quality.I trust it.

[hech54]

- Able to make multiple albums, one for each event, and have one track (mp3) of music per album, and allow me either to sync the slideshow to the music, or make the transition/slides span the entire track, meaning it will auto adjust transition times depending on music length.

And if the MP3 song is drastically longer or short in length than the slideshow?

- Have it so each album plays after each other preferably seamlessly. My only purpose to the albums is to organize them into each event, thats all.

Do you mean each(next) slideshow plays seamlessly? If the authoring portion of the software is worth a damn....that should not be a problem....or a simple setting adjustment prior to DVD folder/image creation would do the trick.

- Ability for the program to randomly order the pictures so it mixes stuff up (doesnt have to be a different dynamically calculated random each time the movie is played obviously, i just dont want pictures that look similar to be played back to back)

Before you add them to the slideshow or during playback on the DVD player?
Either way you are basically screwed on this one. The slideshow software is basically "making a movie of your pictures" and it is impossible for it to just randomly pic a picture out of what is basically am mpeg file AND keep the background music music going too. You are going to need to arrange the pics yourself in each slideshow prior to creating the DVD....plain and simple.

Thats about it. Pretty simple.

Nope....not simple at all actually.....sorry.