Creating DVD Slideshows

You don't always need a computer to view digital photos. With the spread of tabletop DVD players, photo viewing on televisions has also become popular. The growing size and quality of TV screens just adds to this. Tabletop players usually enable the playing of CD's with JPEG-format photos and perhaps the Video CD format. Zoner Photo Studio can compose and burn to both of these formats. However, DVD slideshows are a far more elegant form of photo presentation.

Zoner Photo Studio contains a wizard for easy creation of interactive DVD slideshows, which can easily be played back both in a DVD player and on a computer. The main advantage of this over a photo CD or one in Video CD format is in its customizability.

For example, in a DVD slideshow, you can choose among 162 transition effects, display titles for each photo using the photo's picture information, and add a soundtrack (in WAV, MP3, or even Ogg Vorbis format). In the browser, you can choose between a classical (4:3) ratio of sides and a wide-angle (16:9) one. Many settings are available for customization.

The "pan&zoom" transition effect is worth noting here. Photos are smoothly panned in and out along with zooming of the photo towards either a random target or a manually-set one. Not only will the resulting presentations feel more dynamic, but also, a moving image will look better on CRT screens, due to image tremor. Tremor can also be suppressed in Zoner Photo Studio, using a special option for interlaced mode.

Readied DVD presentations can be burned from Zoner Photo Studio directly, or saved to ISO files (DVD images), which precisely represent a potential burned DVD under the ISO 9660 standard, with the hybrid ISO/UDF 1.02 file system. The ISO file contains everything needed for the burning of DVDs in any environment of one's choice that supports ISO files -- which any burning software will.