Making a QuickTime Slide Show

Telling a story or delivering a message through a sequence of pictures — as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words — is a very common use of computers. Major applications, such as Apple’s Keynote or Microsoft’s PowerPoint, are devoted to this task. Presenting slide shows from images on your disks is also a major feature of such applications as GraphicConverter and iView Multimedia.

QuickTime allows you to create slide shows from images on your disk, as well. However, QuickTime combines them into a platform-independent file that you can view on any computer with QuickTime support.

Of course, going to the effort of importing multiple image files, placing and orienting them just so, and then saving the result as a QuickTime file in PowerPoint seems like an awful lot of effort. QuickTime Pro makes the task a whole lot easier, as follows:

1. Collect the image files you want in your slide show in a single folder.

2. Give them a common name followed by a sequential number.

3. In QuickTime Player, choose File Open Image Sequence and select the first file in your sequence of pictures.

4. Choose a Frame rate in the Image Sequence Settings dialog that appears. The default of 15 frames per second is useful for animations, but you will probably want something a bit slower for a slide show.

QuickTime Player Pro then creates a movie, showing each picture in sequence. If you want to save this QuickTime movie, choose File Save As and then name the movie in the Save dialog that appears. The default radio button selection, Save normally (allowing dependencies), requires you to transport the folder of images along with the QuickTime movie.

Tip

We recommend, unless you’re always going to show the slide show from the machine on which you created it, that you make the movie self-contained to avoid having a piece or pieces missing when you make your presentation.

Tip

If the audio sequence is longer than your slide show, its play is sped up to fit the length of your show; conversely, if it is shorter than your slide show, the clip is slowed down to fit the slide show’s length. You should choose a clip as close in length to that of your slide show as possible. You can find the length required by choosing Movie Get Movie Properties (z-J) and choosing Time from the right-hand pop-up menu.