Magix PhotoStory on CD & DVD 7 Deluxe (PC)

 

 

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I've been using Photostory for a month. Before that I struggled with Ulead Pictureshow, Adobe Photoshop Elements 5 and Premiere Elements 3 and Acrobat 7 for .... strewth, a year? Seemed like two. Magix Photostory is streets ahead of this competition if you want to produce slideshows. It just does that, and very well. The others (apart from Ulead) range far wider, and in my opinion, fail. Photostory is not faultless, but by the standards prevailing, it is excellent.

Good points - The timeline is excellent, and this is where you spend your time. Navigating back and forth never makes this program lag or jump, unlike the others. Best of all, you can stretch the timeline or squash it. With it stretched, you can position photos, narration and background music with real accuracy. With it squashed, you see the overall picture. The program seems very stable. I have never experienced the sound being lost or out of sync. There are lots of options, but watch out - transitions are lost when you output to a .wmv file. That's not Photostory's fault, I think it's a limitation of wmv. It has by far the most comprehensive list of output formats, and it seems to run faster than its competitors. But .pdf is not an output option, and this is such a widespread format, that I reckon it would expand Photostory's appeal, perhaps beyond the home. (Using Acrobat 7 itself yielded music and sound out of sync and a limit of 30 secs on narration clips). I found that the others slowed down as I added more photos, and particularly more narration files. Unlike Photoshop, Photostory obeys Windows conventions (includes a browser like Explorer), and this makes it easy to use, especially when you don't choose to use the Windows default locations (My Videos, etc), and easy to back up.

Bad points - I have not yet found anything helpful in the Help file, and I have not found where you are supposed to download the manual. Does it exist? However the program is fairly intuitive and I've managed to blunder through, so far. Photostory expects you to add narration and music "live" by speaking it or by playing a CD. This means that your commentary is usually accompanied by the whirring of your computer. And it rather ignores how I, at any rate, want to use it - ie to prepare a piece of commentary or music elsewhere, trimming it to some precise length, and then add it to Photostory. It will accept a pre-prepared file, which I drag and drop into position, but there is then only a very crude volume control. The important Ducking feature won't work on a pre-recorded file, and that is a snag. If you have tried making a slideshow which combines photos, music and commentary, you will know that the sound balance is crucial, otherwise the music blurs the speech, or else the speech relegates the music to inaudibility. If Magix could allow us to tweak the sound with the same finesse as the timings, they would have a winner. Ideally I would like to be able to insert milliseconds of silence into the narration track, so that the three components gel together, the way that the broadcasters do it. But it may be a tall order to achieve this within Photostory, although NCH's Wavepad does it well.

Conclusion - Buy it. It is dedicated exclusively to making slideshows and similar, but it does this really well, despite my few gripes. And it's cheap! Photoshop is completely different - it attempts to furnish everything you want to do with photos. But this makes it huge, and, in the narrow field of slideshows at least, eclipsed by Photostory. And Magix Tech Support answered my email, and Adobe never did so.

This is one of the best programs i have used in a long time so easy to use it realy is magix so easy to add sound tracks spoken audio music intros the lot there is so much you can do with this . Why dont you download the trial version first and see for yourself

This is probably the best software which I currently use and well worth the price tag.

If you are just intending to create one or two slideshows then, if you have it, perhaps first try Microsoft's Movie Maker which is bundled with some of the Vista suites - like Magix Photostory, it's very intuitive and you are able to create smart slideshows in minutes but if, like me, you are looking for a package with loads of bells and whistles then definitely go for Photostory. The choice of transitions and effects available is excellent. Add your own music, commentary and videos to create excellent slideshows which are easily copied to DVD.

I've had only one problem in that imported mov files were silent although this was rectified by converting the file to avi format.

I too still haven't found the user manual and I expect I will need to find it shortly to understand what functions the menus are capable of performing. I'm sure there'll be a few functions here that I have not yet found.

So far, so good.

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5.0 out of 5 stars Non compatIbility with windows 7
I have used Magix products for some time and been extremely happy with the results.However when having purchased the latest version of PHOTO STORY ON CD & DVD 7 DELUXE(PC)... Read more

Published on 16 Nov 2009 by George Collis

2.0 out of 5 stars A tragi-comedy?
Actually putting a competent slide show together is quite easy, almost intuitive, it was when I came to burn it that the trouble began. Here is the edited story. Read more

Published on 28 Oct 2009 by veelund

1.0 out of 5 stars A waste of money
After looking for slideshow software online I came to the conclusion that the only way to get a good program would be to buy software. I was so dissapointed with it. Read more

Published on 27 May 2009 by Fitzy

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent software.
Having just bought this software I find there is an udated version available, but I don't know what the improvements are. Read more

Published on 15 April 2009 by John Brown

2.0 out of 5 stars Frustrating DVD burn errors
I installed PhotoStory Deluxe 7 about a week ago and I'm afraid the experience has been very frustrating. Read more

Published on 15 Mar 2009 by Bob

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