best software for slideshow on HD TV?

Hello...back from safari with lots of pictures to share. What is the best software to use to make a nice slideshow with transitions and music which looks great on a wide HD TV screen? I have Adobe PSE 8 (where I can put together a nice slideshow)..and Adobe Premiere Elements 8 trial version - which I found about as frustrating as it gets - no result here so far, only error statements, bugs and crashes. Surely there must be a better way. Any suggestions? thanks!

Many HDTV have USB Ports or card readers hardware and have built in slide show features. I create 1920x1080 Jpeg images for my HDTV and use their built in software to display these.
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JJMack

I used to spend hours putting together slideshows, adding music and transitions, doing everything to make a "really nice" slideshow that everyone would enjoy. Then I discovered that people don't listen to the music or pay much attention to the transitions. They just want to see the pictures. So I use Lightroom to quickly create cropped widescreen versions of my images. Then I transfer them to a flash drive or burn them to a DVD-RW. The flash drive will plug directly into my TV, or the DVD-RW will play on my DVD player. I start the images and we just continue visiting as my guests watch the pictures go by. There are a lot of good programs to do what you want to do. Pro-Show Gold is one, Pinnacle Studio is another, Adobe Premiere Elements is yet another program that will do the job. There are others, too. But just try showing your pictures without agonizing through creating your Academy award show. They aren't as great or as popular as you might think.

If you use a PC (it doesn't work with macs), download a trial version of ProShow Gold at http://www.photodex.com . It's the BEST slide show program on the planet. Period.

It cost $69.95. They have a 30-day free trial version with no watermarks or other crippling of features. If you are ever going to do more than one slide show, this is the program you want. If your need is a one-time need, do it with the trial version.

They have the best tech support I have ever seen. Toll-free seven day. And, the person who answers the phone is the one who helps you. English is their native tongue and I have never had a question they could not answer immediately.

(I do NOT work for them. Just a very very satisfied user.)

padman0008 said:

If you use a PC (it doesn't work with macs), download a trial version of ProShow Gold at http://www.photodex.com . It's the BEST slide show program on the planet. Period.

It cost $69.95. They have a 30-day free trial version with no watermarks or other crippling of features. If you are ever going to do more than one slide show, this is the program you want. If your need is a one-time need, do it with the trial version.

They have the best tech support I have ever seen. Toll-free seven day. And, the person who answers the phone is the one who helps you. English is their native tongue and I have never had a question they could not answer immediately.

(I do NOT work for them. Just a very very satisfied user.)

Click to expand...

I second padman's recommendation. I used ProShow Gold to create Blu-ray discs of my trip to Italy last fall and had no problem getting very good results. It also creates an executable that runs on PCs that can do what ever resolution you want (it will be scaled to 1080p when sent to an HDTV). I had to contact their tech support a few times and they were excellent.

The only suggestion I have is to be very careful of the safe zone area when placing things like titles close to the edges. I put titles very close to the edges and at time well into the safe zones and they were cut off on some TVs I tested on. If you stay within the safe zones you're supposed to be safe on any correctly calibrated TV.

rickpoole said:

padman0008 said:

If you use a PC (it doesn't work with macs), download a trial version of ProShow Gold at http://www.photodex.com . It's the BEST slide show program on the planet. Period.

It cost $69.95. They have a 30-day free trial version with no watermarks or other crippling of features. If you are ever going to do more than one slide show, this is the program you want. If your need is a one-time need, do it with the trial version.

They have the best tech support I have ever seen. Toll-free seven day. And, the person who answers the phone is the one who helps you. English is their native tongue and I have never had a question they could not answer immediately.

(I do NOT work for them. Just a very very satisfied user.)

Click to expand...

I second padman's recommendation. I used ProShow Gold to create Blu-ray discs of my trip to Italy last fall and had no problem getting very good results. It also creates an executable that runs on PCs that can do what ever resolution you want (it will be scaled to 1080p when sent to an HDTV). I had to contact their tech support a few times and they were excellent.

The only suggestion I have is to be very careful of the safe zone area when placing things like titles close to the edges. I put titles very close to the edges and at time well into the safe zones and they were cut off on some TVs I tested on. If you stay within the safe zones you're supposed to be safe on any correctly calibrated TV.

Click to expand...

That's because the edges of a tv screen is not exactly at the edge, there is sometimes considerable overlap! Hence the safe zone...

My PC has two DVI ports. I hook up the TV to the second port, use the display properties functions (right click on the desktop) to make the TV a duplicate of the PC monitor.

You may need a long cable with the needed ends - in my case DVI to HDMI. Try http://www.s-video.com to look for that - in my case a 25 foot cable cost only about $27.

Then you can use whatever software you use on your PC to make a slide show - Lightroom, ACDSee, and lots of others.

If you don't have DVI, an s-video port will work, but the result is nowhere near as good. With the DVI to HDMI setup, I see excellent results, almost as good as on my 24" PC monitor.

If you calibrate your monitor, each video card can only store one set of calibration data, so you will have to choose whether to use a calibrated monitor or a calibrated TV. I believe that if they are on separate cards you could calibrate them both - I have not tried that.

So far, I have managed with the TV not calibrated - will loook into that more in the next few weeks.

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