iFunia’s MagicShow is now available on the Mac App Store for $9.99. The application enables you to turn digital images and accompanying music into a Flash slide show or Flash photo album. You select a template, of which dozens are available, add your media, and the software does the rest.
iFunia MagicShow is $9.99 at the Mac App Store
It comes with 25 templates, and you can add captions and hyperlinks to photos, add up to 500 images in a single Flash gallery, add multiple soundtracks, share the photo gallery on social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace, publish the gallery as an executable file, Flash movie, or HTML code, and more. System requirements are a Macintosh computer running Mac OS X 10.6.6 or later and 13.1 MB of free disk space.
Rovi Corporation has released both Toast 11 Titanium and Toast Pro for the Macintosh, applications that enable you to take digital media such as videos and images from your Mac and share them on devices such as TVs, the Internet, and mobile phones. Toast 11 features include the capability to record to multiple devices at the same time, the capability to save custom video profiles such as iPod or YouTube settings, and the ability to upload directly from the application to social networking sites such as YouTube, Facebook, or Vimeo.
Toast 11 also features an optimized video engine dubbed VideoBoost that the company says offers a dramatic speed increase in H.264 video compression and encoding. Other features include Internet audio recording; the capability to capture, save, and convert Web-based video content; disc spanning (automatically spreading a large amount of data or audio tracks across many discs); one-click backup of HD camcorder footage; dual-platform compatible disc creation; and TiVo-to-Go support. Toast 11 Titanium is priced at $99.99. A Blu Ray disc plug in is $19.99.
Toast 11 features a new video compression engine for faster encoding.
Roxio Toast 11 Pro adds several third party applications including Adobe Photoshop Elements 9, SmartSound SonicFire Pro 5, BIAS SoundSoap, Fotomagico 3, and the Blu Ray Disc plug-in. It is priced at $149.99. For more information, visit www.roxio.com
FotoMagico is a very simple to use professional slide show creator that lets you build slide shows for importing into your video editing projects as well as for playback on YouTube, DVD, and other playback mediums. While you can also create slide shows with a video editing tool, FotoMagico 3.5 is a pure play slide show creator that enables you to take your high resolution photographs and video and add transitions, titles, movies and audio very easily. The interface is easy to navigate, with start and finish main windows, a timeline where you lay down your media, and a bin on the right side of the screen where you can access your media.
FotoMagico's interface is clean and easy to navigate
Getting media to the timeline is a simple drag and drop affair. Once your images are on the timeline, you can make adjustments to each individual image by clicking the image. The image will appear in the Start/Finish window with an adjustment box that you drag to tweak how you want the image to move in the slideshow. You can zoom and rotate the image, set the duration that you wish the slide to appear on screen, add a transition and set its duration, pan and zoom, and under the Window pull down, you can get information on the image (provided it was captured with a digital camera), that will tell you what type it is, when it was shot, with what type of camera, exposure, focal length, and ISO speed. There are also controls for adjusting the flesh tones as well as the lightness and darkness of the image. Once you are done tweaking the individual image, hit the play button and FotoMagico will play the changes that you made to the image.
When you’ve finished creating your slide show, your next step is to Share the show. FotoMagico offers a variety of sharing capabilities, including saving the slideshow as a standalone player, which enables the show to be viewed on any Macintosh computer; save to HD video for importing into your video editing timeline, DVD, Web Movie, YouTube video, iPod Movie, iPhone movie, Apple movie, Apple TV movie, Screen saver, and QuickTime or MPEG 4 movie. When you choose a specific share feature, FotoMagico will detail what the quality of that choice will be. The quality ranges from poor to excellent.
FotoMagico offers a lot of features to create compelling slideshows with images as well as video, and it is very easy to use. The application is available as a standalone tool as well as a plug in for Final Cut Pro and After Effects.
