There is no better way to promote and share your best pictures than by turning them into a pro-looking video. AquaSoft Slideshow Ultimate offers you all the tools and features you require to produce slideshows, presentations, and dynamic photo albums full of creative effects and professional transitions, your favorite soundtrack, subtitles, and even your own voiceover narration.
This app is so packed up with features and settings that its initial window may seem a bit cluttered and hard to master for novice users. Actually, it is, but that is the price we have to pay to have the widest array of features possible always at hand. The other option is to hide them behind labyrinthic multilevel menus, an option that I find even less ergonomic. To complicate things further, the app offers various viewing options (timeline, storyboard, toolbox, etc.) for you to choose the one that better fits your preferences. You can always rely on the program’s wizards, designed to help you create your slideshows in a more straightforward way, or you can start off with Slideshow Premium, which comes with less editing functions and a set of somehow simpler settings. Those who find the Ultimate edition to be too simple for them can upgrade to Stages, fully designed for professional editors who require a wider multimedia support.
The basic workflow doesn’t vary much from that of its competitors – you select your best pictures, arrange them in the timeline, add to them whatever effects and transitions you like best, you then preview and check the results, and save your slideshow in the format of your choice. It is that simple, though you can complicate it as much as your creativity wants. The program offers you a series of templates that you can tweak and enhance with your own ideas and by experimenting with the wide array of motion, color, rotation, and blur effects, to name but a few. You can then save these custom templates for future use.
Among the novelties that Slideshow Ultimate 10 comes with, you will find new time lapse and slow motion effects, 3D rotation, an adjustable blur effect, an improved metadata management system, subtitle support, and more precise video editing and enhancing tools. The audio tools provided are also worth noting. Apart from the (more or less standard) feature that allows you to build your own soundtrack from your favorite music files, the app comes with a professional audio recorder and a set of editing tools – complete with a waveform graph – to add your own voiceover narration and to enhance and synchronize your images and your soundtrack in an intuitive way. You can preview your slideshow in full-screen mode and made as many changes as necessary at any time.
Finally, when it comes to saving and exporting your slideshows, the app offers you the option to burn it to disc (Blu-ray, DVD, SVCD, etc.) or save it as a standalone video file (MP4, AVI, M2TS, MKV, WebM, and many more).
AquaSoft Slideshow Ultimate is not a slideshow creation tool for beginners, though nothing prevents them from trying. This is a fully-fledged pro-looking utility whose level of complexity is on par with its high versatility and the extensive choice of functions and features it provides.
v9.0 [Sep 22, 2014]
Added features:
- Smart templates for all occasions.
- 4K-UHD-support - even for real-time playback.
- Performance improvements - smoother playback and faster video export.
- Map wizard and animated routes - new map designs and many new vehicle graphics.
- New and improved transitions.
- Live preview within the Layoutdesigner: See particle objects and effects while editing your slide show.
- Many new impressive live effects.
- Fully overhauled and powerful particle effects system.
- Better text input and text rendering.
- For tinkerers: Create your own scripts and integrate them.
Other improvements:
- SlideShow Player: Practical thumbnail preview, position indicator and easy navigation.
- User interface improvements: Scalable interface with high-DPI support (large fonts are supported), all program icons available in high resolution.
- New and updated masks and frames.
- Image list can be saved as text file.
- Display times of images can be linked with the default display time.
- Better rendering of envelope curves - quiet parts will be displayed larger in the background.
- Faster loading of templates and effects within the Toolbox0.
- Toolbox categories can be docked and undocked or displayed side by side.
- Title bar of a window can be renamed or hidden.
- Color selection dialog: Color palette can be cleared.
- Shadow color can now be configured within the BitmapFX effect system.
Create banners for your web pages in various formats, like SWF, AVI and GIF
