4 Ways To Use Your Mac To Create Stunning Animated Slideshows With A Few Clicks

Slideshows are a dime a dozen. Or perhaps less expensive than that. Even iPhoto does a decent job of creating slideshows with any group or album of photos.

What if you want more than boring slideshows? What if you want to mix photos and video clips and music into a production fit for a wedding reception or sharing online? For that you’ll need to step up to a different app.

Drag And Drop Slideshows

One of the very first functions a Mac user learns is drag and drop and we use it for nearly everything. Well, drag anyway. Drop doesn’t get used quite as often, but it’s a basic way to use a Mac.

iPhoto and iMovie use drag and drop to create slideshows and movies. Somewhere in between those two Mac apps is Aquafadas’ PulpMotion.

This isn’t an expensive professional grade tool for creating slideshows and presentations which mix and match photos and movies, but it’s close.

The claim to fame for PulpMotion is in four basic areas. Plenty of themes to use to get started. Mixing photos with video clips. Music in the background. And exporting.

Exporting? PulpMotion exports finished productions to Garageband (for audio sweetening or multiple tracks), iDVD to burn as a sharable DVD, iTunes and Apple TV, as well as iPhone and YouTube or any place online.

First, select a theme from the collection.

Then, grab the photos and video clips you want from iPhoto or iMovie and drop them into the theme’s placeholders.

Uh, you’re done.

Well, not quite.

Those steps alone make for a good visual presentation or sharable slideshow, but PulpMotion has a few extras worth exploring, including quick integration of iPhoto, Aperture, and Lightroom media.

Another example is the ubiquitous Ken Burns effect to add motion to static photos. Drop in customizable text to a single photo or across photos and video clips.

PulpMotion contains a bunch of filters to enhance output and provide a unique look to any of the slideshow themes.

I will object to the term slideshow. It just reeks of Kodachrome slide shows that used to bore friends and family and probably started more than a few family feuds.

PulpMotion is more of a mini-production house that specializes in what iPhoto and iMovie don’t do well– creative themes and layouts (over 150 are included). You won’t use the app in place of either, but only to enhance what each cannot do as well.

One note, however, is that PulpMotion really loves fast Macs with plenty of RAM. On my aging MacBook it was slow. On the new MacBook Pro with Retina display and the SSD storage, it screams.

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