Sometimes Tip Tuesday

Here is a great piece of software for the Mac that is truly sweet. It is called FotoMagico. Ok the name is not that cool but when it comes from a company called Boinx software, what can I say. Boinx is a German company and you would not know it in the software but for the goofy name.

As far as the software is concerned it coud not be simpler to use. There are three sections to the screen as shown below. The grey area on the left is where the start and end points of any particular slide are represented. Zoom, rotation, and panning are all determined by pull-points orthe two wheels at the bottom of that window.

It all starts by dropping images on the slide strip or timeline. I really don't like calling it a timeline because the only time you see there is the value of the slide length below each slide. Otherwise there is no time value in sequencing a series of slides with music for instance.

Once the slides are in order and the start and stop points are established the main working center of FotoMagico is in the slider panel on the right side. As you can see from the image below there are controls for Slide Duration, Transition, Image Animation, Audio, Title, and a place to put some notes.

Music can be dropped into a one track panel just below the slide sorter. One cool item in the Audio is that you can determine the start point of the music. The end point is determined by where you drag the end of the song. It is really easy to have multiple songs for different parts of the show by doing this. The one limitation is the ability to fade the music at a different rate than the slide animation.

The three most used panels are the Slide, Transition, and Image sliders. A brief on how these sliders work is this:

Slide

The animation check box will determine if you have one or two panels to adjust your in and out placements. Duration is obviously how long the slide will play including and exit transition time.

Transition

There are numerous transitions that when used in conjunction with some of the other sliders gives a really nice cross-dissolve transition. Even while the animation is in action.

Image

The key in the image slider is to adjust the two blue and two white pointers. The blue pointers indicate where the actual animation starts and stops while the white pointers dictate how long the animation will take to start and stop.

Ok. So is FotoMagico the end all to slide show software. Not a chance. Apples Final Cut or Final Cut Express blows this out of the water as far as capabilities. What FotoMagico has going for it is that the folks at Boinx have made this soooo easy to run, the learning curve is only about 30 minutes and you will have a descent slideshow up and running. Sure there are some tweaks that will improve your work with this product but for $49 nobody can go wrong with this application.

There you have it. I would recommend this to any image editor that has any desire to produce basic slideshows with effect that kick butt.

Thats it for Tuesday folks.