Motivation: Use Ulead VideoStudio 8 for Slideshows
Features: Test of Ulead VideoStudio 8 for creating a Photo Slideshow

Ulead has always lead in graphics innovations. The Ulead PhotoImpact program has seen many of its design innovations paid the highest compliment by competitors - for example both Adobe Photoshop and Jasc Paintshop Pro have taken to showing their filters in a matrix of 40x40 pixel icons that give users a hint as to what each effect will do. Likewise Ulead Video Studio has such innovations as an Overlay track dedicated to video in/on video effects. Or there is the ability to apply video effects to still images while my personal favorite is the ability to view and test any clip: still image, video, audio, title, voiceover in the Preview Monitor as an isolated clip. This allows testing a clip to make sure its working properly alone before being combined in the Timeline with several other clips. Very handy.

So I fully expected Ulead VideoStudio 8.0 to do well in our tests of creating a Picture Slideshow with transitions between all the slides and a couple of audio tracks. This is adjacent to Ulead VideoStudio 8 (henceforth UV8) real strengths in creating movies for CD and DVD, but it also gives a good test of the tool and it features.

Workarea and Loading
UV8'8 workarea has two unique characteristics - first, it is always full screen and cannot be resized. Second, the UV8 workarea has logical but not physical sub windows or working panes unlike in Adobe Premiere Elements where each of the Timeline, Preview Monitor, Media Windows and other dialogs are each movable and resizable. The advantage for UV8's fixed layout is that one quickly learns where to find things; the disadvantage is that at fixed full screen UV8 can sometimes hog valuable screen real estate.

But the layout of the UV8 workarea follow a pattern we are beginning to see in many multimedia tools. A Workflow Tasklist of immediate command buttons across the top left of the screen - and at the extreme right and top the traditional File, Edit, ... Help menus with the complete set of commands for the program. The next group of are respectively:
Properties Pane - which shows the properties of the current clip or object being used/edited
Preview Monitor - which previews either the current clip or the Project Timeline view
Assets Pane - displays icon views of such assets as audio, images, effects, videos, etc
And lying on the bottom of the screen is the Timeline Pane. It can be toggled between two views - the Storyboard view shown above and the Timeline tracks view shown below after loading in photo images into UV8.

Loading photo images into UV8 is fairly simple. First create a slides directory for the new presentation and copy all the images and audio clips that will be used into that directory. Next using File | New Project create a new empty project. Save it to the new slides directory. ( a quick word here - to my surprise, none of the three programs determines what is to be created in the new project- a slideshow, screen capture video, or video to file or to CD/DVD. This is very strange because that is valuable info for setting default properties and behavior like the difference between a Java applet, servlet, Bean, or application.)

Next go to the Asset Pane's pulldown and choose the images option from the list. Then right click anywhere below the pulldown or click on the folder icon to the immediate right of the Assets pulldown. Up pops an open file dialog pointing to the slides directory where you saved the project file. Select the photo images you want to import using SHIFT+Click for a range of images files or CTRL+Click for adding individual files to the list. When done click the Open button and UV8 loads the images into the Assets Pane creating a thumbnail icon for each image.

To load the photos into your slideshow is trivial. Click on the Storyboard view in the Timeline. then just drag and drop the images from the Assets Pane to the Storyboard. Want to put an image in front of an existing one - just drag the new image so it is before the existing one and release the mouse button. Voila the new image is inserted in front of the existing one(s).

Users can also CTRL+click on the slides in the Assets Pane and the drag all the selected images in one operation to the Timeline. To change the order of the images already in the timeline just drag and drop either forward or back and then release the mouse when you have arrived at the gap in front of which the slide show go. In short, plop there. Finally by right clicking on a slide in the Storyboard view users can change its duration in the show from 1 to 5 seconds in increments of 1 second. If users need longer or more precise durations, switch to the Timeline's Track view and then drag a slide's start or end handle as required for precise duration settings.

To add transitions between the slides is just as easy. Click on the Assets pulldown and choose the Transitions type you want - this demo uses the 3D transitions. Ulead has well over 100 transitions so there is certainly one to fit your requirements. In fact users have to be careful that the transitions don't overwhelm the show. So stick to ne major transition alternating with 3-4 others.
   

One of the nice features of UV8 is the fact that Video Filters can be applied to slides. Camtasia has one, zoom and pan, while Premiere Elements has dozens but they only apply to clips. UV8 also has dozens of Video filters (see screen shot at left above)and since they are user customizable, they can be adapted to work with still images.

Again applying the basic Video Filter is simple. Just choose the Video Filter option from the Assets pulldown (see the Screenshot at left above) and as usual, drag and drop that Video filter onto the slide to be changed/effected. In the Properties Windows (see screenshot above at right), users can choose from a number of preset options or customize their own for the specific effect they want. We found the Ripple and Old Film filters very useful and customizable.

Audio and Title Slides

This is starting to be a drill with each new media we use in the presentation. Go to the Asset Pane pulldown select Audio - if the audio tracks you need are not there, just click on the folder icon and go get them(you may want to first copy the audio files to the slideshows project directory to have all the assets in one central place). Now drag and drop the audio clip(s) to the timeline.

As usual you can trim the audio clip by dragging on the Start or End handles. Users can also reposition the audio clip by dragging the center of the clip to the left or right as required.

There are are series of clip wide audio adjustments that can be made from the Music & Voice property pane(see screen at left). Duration allows trimming the audio clip from the end. The Volume setting just below allows setting the overall audio clips volume level. The Fade-in and fadeout allow buttons allow the same effects. However, not they only apply to the complete clip - so you may have trimmed away the fade-in and fade out effects.

Next there is a set of five Audio Filters that can be applied to the clip as a whole and supply some interesting composite effects. Finally by pressing the Audio Track button it is possible to edit the volume profile for any audio clip. Just go to the midline of a clip and drag it up for increased volume or down for decrease. move further along the midline and drag another point u or down to make the desired sound effect(fade in, fade out, swing or whatever). In sum adding sophisticated audio tracks to your slideshows is fairly easy to do in UV8.

So you would expect adding a title slide would be easy as well. Right on:
1) click on the Storyboard view in the Timeline;
2) make the first slide visible by dragging the Timeline slider all the way to the left;
3) Select Color in the Assets Pane pulldown;
4) from the 12 color slides that appear; choose one, drag it and drop it in front of the first slide;
5) to this new color slide add a title by clicking on the Title button in the TaskList;
6) double click as the Title suggests and type in your title.

Done, simple, and you can even add an animation effect if you want. Or more titles and credits at the end of the slideshow. As always color and title slide can be lengthened or shortened by selecting them and then dragging on their Start or End handles.

Producing the Slideshow

Since most photo slideshows are stored on and rendered from a laptops hard disk or a CD, the options for producing a slideshow are fairly simple. We tried both outputs with a small slideshow of 30 images and a large one of 170 images. In the case of the large slideshow we chose the Best Quality Windows Metafile format (720 x 480) 30frame per second with Windows compression. The file took 42 minutes to write on a 2.8GHz Celeron with 700MB of RAM and ended up 33MB in size with high quality output. However, some slides which were inherently large to start with inevitably lost resolution in the downsizing to to the 720 x 480 format. The small slideshow was just about linear in time to write (8 minutes) but for some reason was more than proportionately larger - 8MBs despite using identically the same settings and the same computer. Again the slideshow images were of fairly high quality but again not the highest.

Finally we rendered the small slideshow onto a a CD using VCD format and writing the Ulead player program as well. That took only five minutes to run and the quality of the images were still good but not as good as the .wmv files. For some reason some of the images on CD degraded in quality more than others. It may have to do with the fact that the original images were not all of the same aspect ratio and original size.

In sum, I was very pleased with the output of UV8 - Ulead VideoStudio 8 in creating slideshows. Ulead could provide a little more documentation on how to produce the best results for different media output; the Help file is terse and pragmatic - we await seeing the full documentation. However, the results did past muster at a local camera club; a pretty fussy audience. However, the bottom line is that UV8 is rich and impressive for creating photo slideshows; this is another example of the versatility of the new multimedia software tools.