This entry arises from people always asking what is the best software to show slides at church….
TO MAKE A PRESENTATION WITH NO SOUNDTRACK…
(eg song words for church, a slideshow that plays in the background at a birthday etc)
1. Get a macintosh, don’t waste time with a PC. Don’t use powerpoint unless you want to waste a lot of your time.
2. For a presentation that has plain slides and maybe 1 or two movies, keynote is good. It comes as part of iwork from Apple.
3. If you need to use lots of multimedia, or last minute flexibility to make changes, then ‘see’ may be better. (‘see’ is available from rwts.com.au – sign up for beta version under products – see)
TO MAKE A MOVIE WITH A SOUNDTRACK
(eg a video clip for a song)
To make a movie with words (stills) and pictures AND a soundtrack.
– imovie is easier than keynote, as the timings are MUCH easier, even if the final output is not as pretty (but you probably won’t notice the difference on the big screen)
• make all the lyrics as slides with keynote. Do it at 1024×768 resolution – set in inspector – document- slide size.
export from keynote as export-images-tiff.
• drag all these slides into imovie
• drag other stills (eg pictures) into imovie
• drag the song (music) into imovie timeline along the bottom.
• drag all the stills down to the timeline, they will be default to 5 seconds each.
• add transitions (eg select all then add transition cross dissolve)
• finally, starting at first still, listen to song, work out where still is meant to end, double click the still, change the duration of the still so that it ends where it is meant to. Do this progresively for all the stills.
• export as full quality.
How to extract a movie or photo out of a Keynote presentation – updated for Sierra 
Best presentation controller for keynote or powerpoint 
How to make a Family Feud game in Keynote How to time a Keynote Presentation to a music soundtrack 
How to change the volume on your laptop without a beep sound effect
Just burn your photos onto a CD and stick it in a $50 DVD player! No laptop required, and no Anti-Virus Scan popping up in the middle of your presentation!
Not original – Murray Peterson suggested this one to me. I tried it and it works.
I want to make a slideshow and project it onto a big screen with a multimedia projector. I have a couple of questions. 1. which software should I use? imovie, idvd, or powerpoint? 2. how large should I scan in the photos? Adding music to slideshow. Help! Thanks.
imovie if you want fancy effects and need to match the timing of the slides to the music.
or else iphoto if you just want music in the background,
powerpoint if you just want plain pictures or daggy effects.
photos should probably be 1024×768, jpg.
I use imovie to make our weekly announcements loop for church. It always looks great in my laptop but once I export it as an avi (so it will work on our church PC) I lose a lot of quality.
Any help would be appreciated!
adam
can i follow up on adam’s question?
“I use imovie to make our weekly announcements loop for church. It always looks great in my laptop but once I export it as an avi (so it will work on our church PC) I lose a lot of quality.”
Thanks!