Using Soundslides Plus
Soundslides Plus is a simple-to-use production tool that allows you to make either still image or image and audio slideshows in the Flash format. US photojournalist Joe Weiss developed the original Soundslides software programme. Back in 2002 Weiss was faced with the challenge of having to post slideshow images from 50 different photographers in Flash format and cope with the amount of programming then involved in putting together such a Flash presentation.
Weiss’s remedy to this problem was a programme that automated some of the Flash programming and by August 2005 Soundslides had been developed and fine-tuned sufficiently to enable it to come onto the market with Mac compatibility. As it allowed newspaper photojournalists to quickly and easily produce multimedia presentations, featuring digital images and audio, for newspaper and media websites Soundslides caught on like wildfire in the US.
In the summer of 2007 Soundslides was updated to a pro version known as Soundslides Plus (now available in both Mac OSX and Windows versions). Soundslides Plus incorporates five key new features in addition to those included in the original Soundslides programme. They are:
1 - Image movement - the ability to pan and zoom within an image.
2 - Image gallery non-audio mode.
3 - Lower third subtitles - graphics that can appear towards the bottom of images within Soundslides Plus but aren’t intended for use on every slide/image.
4 - Thumbnail menus.
5 - Individual image transitions.
The basic operation of Soundslides Plus is that for any given/chosen project you can download JPEGs to create a custom slideshow (in which you can choose the size of images and how long each one is viewed for) or you can select the standard slideshow option.
You can add/import a soundtrack file via the ‘SND’ button in Soundslides Plus in either AIFF or MP3 format. For example, if your soundtrack is 3 minutes and 30 seconds (210 seconds) long you can put together a multimedia presentation that shows 70 slides for three seconds each or edit within Soundslides Plus to give longer timings to some of the images.
Images are downloaded into a thumbnail gallery and within the Soundslides Plus interface a sliding timer control allows you to alter and set the time between slides and view them in a preview pane. Captions can be added for each slide, as can photographer credits, and you can choose if you want these to be displayed when the presentation is published on a website.
Before deciding to ‘publish to web’ you can keep making image-timing alterations, caption or credit changes, but any soundtrack changes must be made before importing into Soundslides Plus as the programme doesn’t edit audio. It’s also vital to note that any changes that are made must be saved. The template can also be altered to change any background or foreground colours.
Although most users will opt to import both images and sound into the Soundslides Plus programme it does also offer you the choice to produce an image only slideshow without the addition of any accompanying audio soundtrack.
Please note that Soundslides Plus is only available via internet download and does not come in a CD install version. It’s also worth noting that Soundslides Plus requires you to have at least the Flash 7 plug-in, but this was released back in late 2003. Owners of the original Soundslides programme can upgrade to Soundslides Plus by paying the price differential between the two versions.
The award-winning news photographer Edmond Terakopian produced a Soundslides Plus AV slideshow after shooting the London Fashion Week with his Canon EOS-1D Mark II and EOS 5D SLRs. Here, in a movie Edmond Terakopian explains exactly how he put together a London Fashion Week AV presentation using Soundslides Plus…
You can also find out more about Edmond Terakopian’s journey into the world of New Media in Photography by clicking here
© Edmond Terakopian
Click on the image to view the ‘How to use Soundslides Plus’ movie.
