Thinking of creating a slide show from your favourite vacation photos? Planning to do a slide presentation for Youtube to promote a product or your blog? You don’t have to run out and buy a slide show maker software yet without first giving the free Slide Show Movie Maker a try.
Slide Show Movie Maker is a freeware developed by Joern Thiemann and is now in version 3.7. Basically, you use your BMP or JPEG images or AVI clips to create a slide show and output it to AVI.
You may have trouble downloading the program from the developer’s Web site; the site has a Web page with a black background and grey text. You would have to highlight the text with your mouse to read it.
The program is a download of 635k, which you’ll have to unzip to a 1.5MB folder.
There’s no installation to be made. You just click on the SSMM icon and the program interface pops up.
Getting Started
Like other slide show programs, you work with projects. However, in Slide Show Movie Maker, there’s no option to create a new project. You start importing images first by using the Objects menu.
Then, when you start working with your images, you can go to the File Menu, and choose Save Project. Always give your project a name.
You can also select multiple images by holding down the Ctrl key as you make your selection.
Once you’ve lined up your images, you can shuffle them – move to first, move to end, move up and move down.
Image Preview
There’s a window to preview the images that you line up for your slide presentation. Just click on any file in the list and you get a quick preview to check you have the right images in place.
You can add audio to your slides, but only the WAV format is supported.
Titling
Available options will satisfy your titling needs. You can choose font type, text colour and text background colour. As for text settings, you can do go to the extent of aligning your text to top and bottom left, center and right.
Fading Effects
What catches your eye is the number of impressive fading effects available. You will never finish experimenting with these pro-quality fading effects. It seems every fading effect in the book has been thrown into the program.
What’s more, you can even preview your effects by clicking on the Show Fading Preview button on the panel to your right. The Fading Effects can be added to your text as well.
Limitations
Working with Slide Show Movie Maker is synonymous with working with limitations. There’s no support for such image formats as TIFF and PNG. Video format is limited to only AVI. You would need a conversion software if your video is in other formats.
The same applies to the output option. If you want an output format other than AVI, you would have to resort to a media converter.
There is no support for MP3 format. This is the format that we would like to store most of our audio files in.
As most of the features are crowded in a single interface, you may need time to figure things out. But, once you get the hang of the program, you should breeze through future projects.
Still, for a freeware Slide Show Movie Maker performs impressively.
Kudos to the developer for a job well done.