How to make a good slideshow to view on a projector.

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.