Slideshows

[Chris Poisson]

If you think Fotomagico is klunky, you are in for a shock on the rest of the lot. I think it’s superb, could do in my sleep.

But, you might try PanZoomPro from lyric.com, works inside FCP. Fotomagico “klunky?” Sheesh!

[Kevin]

Hi Chris,

Klunky is probably not the overall correct term to describe my experience with Fotomagico. I wrote to the delveloper earlier agreeing that it is very intuitive and fast if you are playing from your computer. In terms of creating a DVD or previewing online, I found it hugely ineffecient in its workflow. Everyime you make a change to a show you have to render out everything which on my Quad 2ghz tower is taking 4 hours! On their website they say this is the case and that outputting should be done overnight, but that doesn’t work at all for our workflow situation where we do three and four of these things in a week. Also you can’t fint tune music and there’s no way to access or alter original images without reimporting. I had no success in auto altering the slide show to fit music. I got the confirm dialogue for what I intended, hit yes and saw no changes inthe timeline. I had some other more specific concerns that I outlined in my email to the developer which I outline below.

For now it seems my best bet is iPhoto which though quite limited, at least interacts with the other iLife apps and will allow changes and updates without taking up the whole day.

If there are other apps you can think of that I should be trying I would love to hear. I toyed with Roxio’s Moving Images HD which I really like but a non timeline program can make it difficult to edit precisely to particular music.

Many thanks for your feedback.

Kevin

>>>>>>>I am using version 1.8. My hardware configuration is Quad G5 2 GHz with 1.5 ram.

The thumbnail remain blank with when I save and start up the program again. Not all of them just 20% and towards the end.

Having completeed a slideshow project, I think Fotomagico is a great program for showing a slideshow from a computer but for creating a DVD it has way more drawback than advantages for my purposes.

Main ones are. There’s no autosave. And because of the very lenghty project saving period – because the images are contained in the project file I’d imagine, it’s not practical to save frequently either. With motion runningin the background FM frooze twice yesterday which meant I lost a full day of edits which obviously isn’t a productive workflow.

When I'[ve tried to adjust the selected slides to the music connected I, I get the dialogie confirming the action but then nothing. I need to adjust the image lenght anually to macy the lenght of the song.

On this issue, unfortunately the program makes finetuning audio quite difficult if not impossible so again I miss the control I have with Final Cut of even iMovie.

The reason I was looking for an alternate from FCP was because of the lenghty rendering, but I am looking at a 10 minute slideshow in FM which is now taking me 3.5 hours to export. So I presume, even though FM is containing media separately, it doesn’t save any enders. This makes it quite impractical for making changes and republishing as that process takes over half a day. With FCP, with everything rendered out, you can export a reference movie in minutes and be authoring a revised DVD almost immediately after

Then there is the lack of interaction with iPhoto. It’s a really lengthy process to mak alterations in iPhoto and then open and close FM, and even then the incidence of the slide int he timeline doesn’t update. Regarding itunes. I can’t see my music library in FM, I presume because all my music is located on external drives, so that aagain is a very lenghty process of saving to the desktop and then taking into FM.

So unfortunaley rather than finding FM a quicker solution for creating slideshow (to be shown other than via a computer) I’ve found the process to be considerably slower and also quite a bit less flexable than the tools that Apple offers, so it doesn’t really represent a help or solution for my purposes, so I’ve had to migrate back to FCP on this occasion.

I hope the above issues are helpful for you in working out some improvements or directions for future versions.<<<<<<<<<

[Chris Poisson]

Kevin,

I’ll admit that exporting from FM is a little tricky, but I don’t have any problems with it. I did a show last week from a photo disk, and with about 160 pics it took about 20 minutes to render a 720p movie. When I have alterations on photos in folders I’m using, I find doing a save updates them in FM, at the very least restarting the project will do it.

I must also admit I don’t use music in FM, about 90% of my shows have pics that can be the same length, so I just divide the number of shots into the length of my song and it comes out great. After it’s built I will rob from peter an pay Paul to make some shots longer or shorter, but my show length stays the same. A somewhat simpler workflow than yours certainly, but it’s saved me a ton of time, and I don’t find the renders take any longer than AE or FCP for what I do.

FM is about to announce v2, which hopefully will address some of your issues.

[Jeremy Garchow]

Eons ago I used a program called Still Life to do very simple moves on pictures, rendered them to quicktime and edited for time in FCP. This was way back in FCP3 so I have no idea if the program is still around. A quick Google search turns up this:

https://www.grantedsw.com/still-life/

Jeremy

[Kevin]

Hi Jeremy,

Many thanks for posting back. I haven’t been able to locate anything on Still Life (might be that the search term is a pretty open one, so it might well be out there but I’m just not seeing it).

I think I’ll go to iMovie for now as I think the interoperability and workflow will be pretty efficient.

Strange that having used FCP on a pro level for 5 years that I need to migrate to an iApp to accomplish this pretty standrd task of building a slideshow.

The only pluggin I’ve found for FCP is Lyrics Pan and Zoom Pro. I’ll take a look at that first and see if it fits the bill.

Again many thanks for posting back!!!!

Peace

Kevin

[Kevin]

Hi Chris,

Many thanks for the follow up. Yes as a Kiosk playback software I think it does it’s job really well but the almost inoperability with the iApps is kind of a deal breaker for me. Also I must look further into the render out. I see in the prefs that it’s using Apple’s Intermediate coden to render DVD (don’t quite understand that) but at 4 hours (trust me, I just counted them) down workflow is at a standstill right there. iMovie or even iPhoto are obviously a little more consumer oriented but the access to the other iApp media and options for quick publishing make it a much better choice for me. Granted I am using iMovie for the first time – I’ve been editing with FCP since version 1, but I already can see that I have much more flexability for updating and sharing versions with clients which is an essential part of my workflow. I’m still not seeing the benefit of FM. It would seem what it clains to do best is maintain maintain the highest resolution. Does it have some proprietary codec or how is the improved quality realized? One way of the other the fact that it operates in isolation from the other iApps makes any benefits it offers in quality rendering not quire work the time for me.

This is something I’d love to learn more about – the workflow of other members on the list – so hopefully some people will chime in with their expertise.

Again many thanks for the feedback. I’ll keep an ey out for

[Jeremy Garchow]

The link didn’t work?

[Kevin]

Hi Jeremy,

Sorry I didn’t notice the link. I’ve downloaded it and will give it a shit.
From looking around though it would seem that there are some standalone apps that one up iMovie and iPhoto with optional extra option, (usually rotation). For my purposes though I think that iMovie, just being so easy to use suffices for my purposs, is somewhat flexible, plus it’s an easy path to sharing which is key. I figure I might as well get goodd with iMovie and I’m sure it will bee updated to offer the options the other apps hove shown to be desireable.

Again many thakns for the feedback and help.

Peace,

Kevin

[Kevin]

Also just noticed hat FotoMagico can’t import any video so I woul;dn’t be able to use titles created in Motion for example. There’s a big price to pay in terms of convenience sometimes (not always) when you stray from the iApp digital hub path 8^)

Peace

Kevin