Get the Beat Matching on Your Slide Show!
Review by Michael Corsentino
There’s nothing like a slide show to get clients, friends, or family excited about the images you’ve captured for them. Add music to the equation and the emotional impact gets ratcheted up exponentially. Music creates a sense of drama and impact like nothing else does.
Until now, if you wanted to stand out from the crowd and create slide shows that matched your images to the beat of the music, it’s been a painstaking, time-consuming process requiring advanced expertise with expensive and complicated video-editing software. Who has time for all that?
The clever development team at Pixellu, creators of SmartAlbums and SmartSlides, has come to the rescue by adding Automatic Beat-Matching technology to their web-based SmartSlides application. Better still, they’re making it available to all current users at no additional cost.
Like all Pixellu software, the guiding principle with their new Automatic Beat-Matching technology is simplicity, ease of use, and a clutter-free interface. Creating a beat-matched slide show is as easy as choosing a song from Pixellu’s built-in library of music. Each song lists the suggested number of images needed to automatically match the images to the beat of that song in one of two flavors, “Slow” or “Uptempo.”
If you opt for a slower show, fewer images are required, which results in a show with fewer transitions and increased screen time for each image. Conversely, if you choose the faster Uptempo option, you’ll use more images, which produces a show with more transitions and reduced screen time for individual images. The best part is it’s all up to you!
In the event that the number of images you have doesn’t meet the criteria for either of the Automatic Beat-Matching options, SmartSlides still has you covered with a manual mode that allows you to trim the song, add or delete images, or add an additional song segment.
No slouch in the image-quality department either, SmartSlides uses uncompressed HTML5 to display images, resulting in stunning, high-quality, 4K-compatible slide shows. Shows can also be easily shared or distributed using built-in social media badges online or via downloadable, high-definition 1080p MP4 video files. ■
