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Creating a Video CD Slideshow with Photo Explorer (Part 1 - Part 2)

Photo Explorer is more than just an image browser. It also has the capability to combine your favorite photos and images into a multimedia slide show, complete with eye-catching transitions and text effects. You can even add your own audio commentary or musical accompaniment to a slide show. With Photo Explorer’s slide show creator, it’s easy to arrange a great looking slide show for viewing on either a computer or TV. No matter what the details of your slide show, the procedure for creating it is essentially the same. Just follow these steps and your slide show will be showing on a TV or computer screen in no time.

Step 1: Build a Slide Show
The first step in creating a slide show is to assemble your selection of images and put them into the proper sequence. This is much easier to do if you first gather all the images together into a single folder on your hard drive.

  1. To get started, open Photo Explorer and use the familiar tree-type folder listing to locate and select c:\Program Files\Nova Development\Photo Impact Pro\Tutorial Images\ Creating a Video SlideShow. When you select the appropriate folder, thumbnails of your images appear on the right side of the window.

  2. Now you are ready to begin constructing a slide show. Choose Slideshow from the Tools menu. The slide show panel appears at the bottom of the Photo Explorer window.
  

 
  1. Now comes the fun part: Drag an image from the thumbnail list down into the slide show panel. It appears there inside of a small frame, called a slide. Continue to drag images to the slide show panel until you have assembled a row of slides. You can drag images to the slide show panel one at a time, or you can select several images and drag the selected group into the slide show. Don’t worry if the slides are not arranged perfectly at first; you can rearrange them later.

  2. Drag the slide icons left or right as needed to rearrange the slide sequence. Remember that the slides will be displayed, one at a time, in order, from left to right. If you find a slide in the slide show panel that you want to remove, just click that slide and press Delete. It disappears from the slide show panel.
  

Step 2: Customize the Slides in a Slide Show
After you assemble the images for your slide show, you can customize the presentation by adding a caption or description to each image. You can also add an audio commentary that will play back while the image is on screen.

  1. Select a slide in the slide show panel, and then click the Slide Options button to open the Slide Options dialog box.

  2. Type a short caption in the Description box. For example, you might type Our favorite vacation spot. This text will be displayed in the border of the screen around your image during the slideshow. You will be able to specify the location and appearance of this text a little later.

  3. To add a voice narration to the slide, click the Enable sound annotation check box. If you have pre-recorded the narration, select the Select sound file option and type the file name of the sound file into the File name box. If you don’t already have a sound file to play with this slide, you can quickly record a voice-over description if you have a microphone plugged into your computer. To record your narration, select Recorded sound and then click the Record button (red circle), and begin speaking into the microphone. When you are finished, click the Stop button (black square).

  4. Slide shows have a default duration setting that controls how long each slide remains visible on the screen. However, you can override that default setting for individual slides. To set the slide duration for the current image to five seconds, click Custom and type 5 in the box to the right. Alternatively, if you have chosen to include an audio annotation for this slide, you can select Same as sound annotation to have the slide remain on the screen as long as the selected audio clip.

  5. Click OK to apply your customization to the current slide. Repeat these steps for any other slides that need optional settings.
  


(Part 1 - Part 2)

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