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Jimco Software Reviews - Ultimate S 2.1 (continued)
The Photo Montage Tool
Slide show tools are all over the place. Despite the fact that almost all CD/DVD burning software offers this capability, I still look to Vegas to create my photo montages. If you want professional quality results, use a professional quality tool.
Creating photo montages in Vegas isn't hard, but it's time-consuming. The guys at VASST know this and they've addressed it quite nicely with Ultimate S's Photo Montage tool, shown in figure 1. This isn't your ordinary photo montage creation tool. All of the strengths of Vegas are here and creating a professional quality montage can be accomplished quickly.
Figure 1 - The Photo Montage Tab
Ultimate S has the ability to use photos already on the timeline, photos in a specific media bin, or photos on the file system. Photo Montage in Ultimate S isn't just for photos either. You can also use video for your montage. Sweet!
Options abound in the Photo Montage dialog. You can configure whether to use markers for the placement of transitions or have Ultimate S place the transitions automatically. Ultimate S can even make the transitions automatically fit the music you've chosen. In our tests, results were actually quite good using this method.
 I was able to create a professional quality photo montage presentation in fewer than 5 minutes.
Ultimate S can automatically add pan and scan effects to your montage. You control the direction, how much zoom is applied, and how much movement is applied. The results are exactly what you'd get if you spent hours doing it yourself. Ultimate S can even automatically change the aspect ratio of your images so that they match your project or the aspect ratio you specify.
You may end up needing to tweak some of the pans and/or zooms after Ultimate S has generated your montage, but because Ultimate S is simply the front-end for some complex scripts, editing the effects it adds in the Vegas interface is problem-free. I was able to create a professional quality photo montage presentation in fewer than 5 minutes, and the quality of it was the same as one I created manually in over 4 hours of work. That's just simply amazing!
Once everything is set up just the way you like, you can save your settings as a preset. Ultimate S allows you to save up to 999 presets so you needn't ever worry about reproducing your special settings in future photo montages.
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