Product ReviewsMultimedia software
PulpMotion Advanced is the latest version of Aquafadas' slick slideshow compiler, adding greater user control, audio annotation, and several new themes and features. Slides and movies are displayed sequentially using a variety of special effect themes. Some feature complex 3D environments, such as books where the images are revealed as the pages are turned, or rendered art galleries in which images are hung on walls that you can pause in front of. Others pan along a wooden shelf, while some are more abstract, with images sliding onto the page or merging from several translucent copies. There are even plainer environments that simply show the image on the left with the caption sliding in from the right. Multiple audio tracks can be added to a composition, with an internal audio editor that allows you to select portions of songs. It's not an easy process, though. You have to drag separate sliders rather than dragging the waveform itself, and there's no audio preview as you scrub along the track. Audio can be assigned to individual or multiple slides, or to the whole composition, which can then be set to last as long as the audio track, with individual slide timings adjusted automatically. There's no way to ease in and out between tracks, though - it's a sharp transition. However, the ability to add audio commentaries through an iSight or external camera is a welcome feature. New to this version is a feature called 'Regions of interest', which allows you to specify a number of rectangular areas within a single image, each with its own caption. When played, each of these areas will appear by itself at full-screen, with the camera panning over each one before pulling back to reveal the segments rotating into place on the final image. This is
As we've come to expect from Aquafadas, there's a tremendous amount of user control here. You can set the texture and colour of gallery walls and floor, for example, or the precise shade of the translucent rectangles that float in the background of the more avant garde themes. With all the control neatly divided into simple, manageable panels, customising the finished effect is straightforward. Finished compositions can be exported to a variety of formats, such as an iPod, the web or a DVD. Text can be added as captions and displayed in different ways according to the current theme. The font size is set for the whole theme, but there's no auto adjust feature to cope with long captions - and the default text size varies from theme to theme. This means that if you type a caption reading, say, 'Here we are on holiday' on a slide in one theme, you may find that when you change to another theme the caption reads 'Here we are on'. It's up to you to check each caption to make sure it fits. There are other text handling problems, too. The default title for each theme is 'Composition Title', which can be changed in the relevant Composition Settings panel. This means that when you switch to a different theme, the title is lost and replaced with 'Composition Title'. With all themes, the image will zoom to its final size, and stay there. But in some cases this means that the title is half chopped off at the top of the screen. While the themes are entertaining, some are more ambitious than the technology can support. With the book themes, for example, the images don't appear until after the page is fully turned, which spoils the effect. There's no way to create a simple Ken Burns effect pan and zoom across an image either. After the transitional animation each image has to fit within its frame, occupying a portion of the screen, according to the preset built into each theme. Whether you like PulpMotion depends entirely upon how much of a fan you are of built-in themes. For many, their tricksy appeal will soon fade and their undoubted ingenuity tends to swamp the images, which can be both distracting and irritating. By Steve Caplin |
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