Photodex ProShow

Photodex ProShow is a tool to make your everyday boring still pictures come alive. ProShow comes in three flavors, depending on the size of your wallet. My personal flavor is the US$69.95 Gold flavor.

What it does?

For my still images it does three things;

• Add background sounds.
• Allows zoom, pan and tilt on my images, making them seem alive.
• Adds captions to images.

Of course, it does a lot more - depending on your flavor. A flavor comparison guide is found here.

What is produce

This is the best part. If produces lots of output formats.

• Flash video
• An Windows Executable
• DVD's (it can burn DVD's directly)
• VCD
• HTML via ActiveX control
• MPEG1/2
• QuickTime
• HD TV compatible outputs
• Autorun CD (with Windows Executable)
• Screen saver

The GUI

The GUI is relatively easy to work with. I spent 3 hours to get a grip on the product. And when you have learned how to use ProShow you can move on and do more with it. The only glitch I have found is that it does not work well with AVG 7.5 Anti-Malware. AVG from time to time eats all my memory when ProShow is running, and ProShow locks up. (The solution for now is to wait until AVG is done - then I can continue to work.)

Flavors

As I mentioned it comes in three flavors. Producer, Gold and Standard. The producer is my choice of product if money is of no issue. It has lots of more features than Producer. I can add motion to captions, open RAW camera files, loop videos and much more.

The Standard edition does nothing exiting, and you probably want to go for Gold right away - it is worth the extra US$40. At least I will.

You can compare the flavors here.

Demo

Of course I have to show a demo as well.

Format	Size
Windows Executable	6MB
Flash 1.5Mb broadband	12MB in files
Flash for ISDN	2MB in files
Web with ActiveX	4MB in files
MPEG for PC	22MB