Roxio Products
Roxio makes a product for the Macintosh called Toast, which is a suite of DVD authoring and creation tools. For years, Toast has been the standard for the Macintosh--and now they have begun to bundle different applications in various editions. One of the coolest applications they include is a product titled Motion Pictures HD. This nifty tool allows you to quickly blend still images together with music to create photo slide shows. It is fun and easy to use--and you might already have it if you have a Toast package. Check your applications folder and read below to get a quick tutorial on the basics.
Instructions
1. Locate Motion Pictures HDD in your applications folder and open the application, which will display a blank page. The music tab will automatically display all music in your iTunes library. You can use the media browser to locate your iPhoto library or simply drag the photos that you select from the finder.
2. To drag the photos, simply locate them in the media browser, then select and drag them to the blank page. Notice that once you have imported your photos you can drag and drop them to put them in any order you want for your slide show movie.
3. You can add a music track by simply clicking on the music tab and searching your iTunes library. Notice it displays the length of the movie, amount of frames and the length of the music. You can specify if you want the music to repeat, fade out and fade in, plus other options.
4. You can add group pictures by using the group picture tool. Reorder them on the page and they will appear in a sequence on a single slide. This allows great flexibility in displaying images in your slide show.
5. The motion for each image can be adjusted in a variety of ways. Note the crop handles, which allow you to frame the part of picture to be displayed. You can also select from a variety of motion effects and alter the rotation, zoom and cropping for each image.
6. When you are done with all the adjustments, it's time to make your movie. Here you can adjust the border size and color to be applied to the images. You can also adjust the timing to make your slides change quicker or slower. You can adjust aspect ratio and even add beginning titles or import your movie into Toast or iMovie to add titles. There are a variety of export formats and you can export directly to iMovie, iDVD or Toast. Out of all the products I have used, this is one of the easiest to learn and produces high-quality movies to integrate into a larger production or use as stand-alone productions.
