Originally developed for Mac and now also available for Windows, Photo to Movie is an application to turn sets of photos into a movie presentation or slideshow. The application allows you to create complete slideshow movies with soundtracks, titles and graphics. It has a large bunch of motion effects and transitions, and you can define specific actions as motion templates.
LQ Graphics is the Dublin, California (I initially thought they were Irish) developer of Photo to Movie version 4.6. The software exists for about five years. The developer sent us a license for the application and an additional license for a transitions pack. The latter seriously increases the number of Photo to Movie transition effects you get access to.
Photo to Movie has a familiar interface. It has an iTunes like sidebar where you can navigate to your assets, an Inspector, a Timeline, and a main image window. In the timeline there is room for photos, multiple audio tracks and multiple title/graphics tracks. All of these tracks can have transitions and even effects. To fit a slideshow to a narration or audio track, there is a menu command to evenly increase or decrease the slideshow so it will synchronize with the audio — this is in addition to fine-tuning the synchronization on a per-photo basis.
Photo to Movie 4.6 lacks a narration feature, but you can get integrated narration nevertheless. Apparently, the developers at LQ Graphics have chosen not to include a voice recording capability anymore, but are considering to include the voice recorder in Photo to Movie 4.7 again. Their reason not to include it anymore was that there are many setup options for voice recording to get it right. Instead, they wanted to keep the focus on the slideshow, not on voice recording.
The two recommended options for voice recording for the current version of Photo to Movie are:
Mac users can download the free voice recorder from their site called “Sound Recorder” that integrates nicely with Photo to Movie.
If you’re not on a Mac (or even if you are), you can download the free Audacity sound recorder. The audio files exported from Audacity (AIFF format) work directly in Photo to Movie. I was told this to be a fully featured solution that will continue to be a recommended application even when LQ Graphics integrates a basic recorder in their next version.
Except for voice recordings, you will probably want to add some background audio like music. Photo to Movie 4.6 not only supports multiple audio tracks, but also transitions between music clips and fading. You can even split clips if you want it.
Equally impressive is Photo to Movie’s title support. Besides having title start and stop appearing wherever you want, the timing of a title of graphic (think arrows, callout balloons, etc) can be linked to a photo. Titles can have several effects and be transparent or semi-transparent. Except for titles, Photo to Movie also supports adding captions to photos. The addition of captions will result in the addition of two new title tracks in your document — captions can be made up of a title, a date and time, file name, etc., and the different caption elements can be separated either by a space or a carriage return.
The core functionality of Photo to Movie is of course the photo track. Now, in most slideshow applications, you’ll have a bunch of transitions and the so-called Ken Burns effects and that’s it. In Photo to Movie you’ll also get motion paths. Motion paths work more or less like the camera movement feature for creating animatics in ToonBoom’s Storyboard Pro: you get two frames for each photo.
In-photo transition effect
The first frame is where you are starting, while the second one is your end position. With Photo to Movie’s keyframe functionality, you can now even set Bezier curves for the in-photo transition from one part of the photo to another. The uniqueness of this feature becomes clear when you have multiple focal points in your photo and you want to draw the audience’s attention to each of these points as the presentation progresses.
In competing software, jumping (or smoothly traveling) from one focal point to another in a photo requires you to add as many identical photos to the timeline as there are focal points. The most obvious example of this is a group photo of people in which you want to go from face to face.
Except for just going from one element in your photo to another, you can also add rotation and zooming to these in-photo transitions.
Photo to Movie 4.6 finally exports your finished movie to QuickTime, iDVD or YouTube (with an automatic upload). This enables you to integrate the end-result with Final Cut Pro and other third party video editing applications easily.
At the end of my test period, I came to the conclusion that I found Photo to Movie to be quite a powerful slideshow application. It’s actually more powerful than FotoMagico, especially in the title domain and the ability to add motion paths within one photo. The one area where it must bit in the dust is voice recording, but I can see why the developer is reluctant to include it, and I think he has a point. On the other hand, even if I were never to use it, I sort of expect it to be available.
The only real criticism that I have is in the interface department. While the interface is far from counterproductive it doesn’t look terribly polished to me. In that respect, an application like FotoMagico has a better wrapping and good looks inevitably play a role in today’s crowded software market. However, I promise that if you make an effort to judge the Photo to Movie by its capabilities, you’ll find a very strong offering. Photo to Movie 4.6 costs approx. 40.00 Euros.
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