Photo Fusion: A Wedding Photographers Guide to Mixing Digital Photography and Video

Chapter 13. ProShow Producer

For years, Photodex, the makers of ProShow Producer, has offered software that facilitates making slideshows. Initially a PC only program, Producer has enabled photographers to add video to their slideshows, though they have only recently been aggressively marketing the Fusion capabilities of Producer. A free trial is available at www.photodex.com and might be valuable to have while working through this chapter with us.

A step up from iMovie, Producer is a robust program designed specifically for photographers, not videographers. Producer does not offer the same editing capabilities as programs like Final Cut Pro (Apple Inc.) and Premiere (Adobe Systems Inc.). For Fusion-ographers, though, features such as a video trimmer, slide styles, and HD output, make Producer a viable editing solution.

We use Producer on our Mac via VMware Fusion. Installing Producer was straightforward once we had our virtual machine on our Macs, but you will need the Windows operating system in order to run Producer. If you already use a Windows machine, installation will be quite simple.

This chapter will take you through the steps needed to produce a basic (stills + audio + video) piece.

Figure 13.1. Producer is a great option for both Mac and Windows users

Getting Started

Everything you need is accessible through the menu bar and the toolbar (see Figure 13-2 and 13-3) and has all ...