ProShow Producer

The top dog of Photodex's presentation line is ProShow Producer, a powerful video/image slideshow creator with a host of powerful features and--depending on your perspective--one possible deal-killing limitation. What, pray tell, is said limitation? Producer offers only a single image/video track on its timeline. That means what while you can layer video and images within a single cell for simultaneous display, you can't for instance display a series of images sequentially over a video as you can with an editor that allows multiple tracks. This won't affect many users, but at this price I thought it worth mentioning.

On the up side, the strict slideshow approach to construction also provides a sense of structure that will appeal to presentation mavens. And, there are tons of nice editing features and FX including over 200 slide transitions, excellent video processing features such as colorization and flipping, and captions that you can make travel across the screen. You can even start with one colorization effect and gradually morph to another. All in all, it's rather unique and easy to use product that's well worth a look--especially for business types looking to spice up presentations.

Note: See our review of ProShow Gold for more info.

--Jon L. Jacobi