Most Helpful Customer Reviews
36 of 37 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
A mess of a book, August 1, 2008
This review is from: The Official Photodex Guide to ProShow (Paperback)
I have used ProShow Gold for years and love it. I have produced dozens of slide shows for travel and photo clubs and have produced DVDs for sale with the program. This book is a total mess, just not useful. So many problems, where to begin. Each should be corrected in a totally revised version.
1. The book is a giant sales pitch for the much more expensive Producer version of the program. One cannot get past chapter 5 without Producer. The book should have been divided into sections with the beginning explaining common features of ProShow Gold and Producer. The end of the book could discuss features unique to Producer.
2. The CD files that come with the book are very frustrating to get to play with Windows Vista. There is no explanation of how to get them to play.
3. Many of the features of Gold are not mentioned. This book is of little help to a beginner. Many of the check boxes, choices and methods to produce slide shows are ignored or not explained in enough detail.
4. The book totally ignores how to deal with big digital photo files and small amount of computer RAM. Many will overload their computers unless they first convert photos to lower resolution. A resolution of say 1000 to 1500 pixels across is all that is needed. I convert my photos first before construction big slide shows.
5. The book ignores techniques for using adjacent copies of slides to produce creative motion effects. Again, it is a sale pitch for the more expensive Producer version without showing how to do great shows with the less expensive Gold version.
6. The book goes into great detail of moving boxes with the Producer version, showing how to create mind numbing multiple boxes, motion, zooms within boxes and frames and moving text all on one screen. This is total mental overload for anyone looking at such a slide show. If Hollywood thought this to be artistic, they would have incorporated moving boxes, text, zooms and more into their movies. These techniques which are covered in several chapters just lead to confusing, frustrating, non-artistic messes of slide shows.
7. The book ignores various techniques to fill a horizontal screen with vertical images. The author could have given some good tips.
8. As others have indicated, the book is full of errors, typos and mistakes. The book should have been tested by novices to the program before publication. Get ten people from the street and let them learn from the book and try to create a slide show. Total confusion and frustration will be the result.
I wanted to see what features Producer has that Gold does not. The book did not do a good job of listing them. I came away definitely convinced that the cheaper Gold version is a great program and that the expensive Producer is not needed by 95% of users. I very much recommend buying ProShow Gold but not this book.
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15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
ProShow disappointment, July 28, 2008
This review is from: The Official Photodex Guide to ProShow (Paperback)
This book is loaded with highly detailed explanations of very technical operations, but it is also loaded with many typographical and spelling errors, incomplete or incorrect references, illustration errors, missing or vague instruction details, etc. After my first week with the book, I was thoroughly frustrated and mentally whipped from having to track down and verify all of the errors and dig through the software to make certain I understood the point the author was attempting to make. It is as if the editing phase never occurred - it certainly appears that the book was rushed prematurely to production before it was ready. Additionally, even though the book is touted as being appropriate for both ProShow Gold and ProShow Producer users, 5 of the chapters (almost half the book) are devoted exclusively to Producer and are worthless for those of us who had purchased ProShow Gold. Had I bought the book locally, I might have requested a refund.
A second printing of the book has been promised, with corrections incorporated. Hopefully the problems I encountered will have been resolved, and corrections/updates made available to those of us who purchased the first printing. (I have received .PDF files from other authors with updates to their publications.)
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14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
One word describes this book: awesome!, June 19, 2008
This review is from: The Official Photodex Guide to ProShow (Paperback)
It's rare in the technical "how-to" genre to find a book as well done as this one. It truly is awesome.
Photodex ProShow has long been one of the staples for those who produce or wanted to produce high-class slide shows. Over the years, the product, along with everything else it seems, tended more and more toward becoming a multimedia platform. A few years back, this trend reached fruition in the immensely powerful ProShow Producer.
The problem was that both programs had more power than was adequately explained in the supplied help files. Don't get me wrong: Photodex provided great help files (as well as great support). It's just that programs, particularly ProShow Producer are capable of so much.
At last to the rescue comes James Karney with this masterpiece of a "how-to" book.
Every aspect of using ProShow Gold and ProShow Producer is explained through text and examples on the supplied CD. Karney explains his goal on the first page of the introduction: ProShow is "easy to use", but hard to master. "The novice can create a slide show in a minutes, but crafting a real multimedia production requires learning how to use special effects, keyframes, and output formats." Karney covers all these subjects and far more in 13 chapters and 340 pages.
As someone in the industry who must read dozens of technical books of the "how-to" variety, I know that most of the titles are just adequate and many are awful. It is truly refreshing to encounter someone like Karney who not only truly mastered his subject instead of just recycling the help file, but can also write. This is his 24th book.
Karney begins with the basics and then builds step-by-step into more elaborate productions using more and more of ProShow's features. One of the features, keyframing, is extremely versatile and Karney cleverly comes back to it repeatedly as he shows how increasingly sophisticated use of keyframing enables you to create more sophisticated productions.
If you own PhoShow Gold or Producer, you need this book to get the most out of either program. If you don't own them, but need a dependable, incredibly powerful multimedia creation engine, then you need to check ProShow out - trial copies are included on the book's CD and are, of course, downloadable from the publisher's site. Either way, you definitely need this book to learn how to get everything you can out of ProShow.
Simply put, this book is a gem and beautifully complements a powerful program.
Jerry
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