Review: PulpMotion 3.5 sports an easy UI for making slideshows
If a picture is worth a thousand words, a slideshow is a great way to tie together multiple pictures to tell a story. The popularity of slideshows has constantly increased in the past few years, spurred by their effective use by a number of filmmakers—most notably documentary director Ken Burns, after which the homonymous zoom-and-pan technique is named—and aided by software programs that make creating sophisticated slideshows easier and easier every year.
This brings me to Aquafadas’s PulpMotion for OS X, which takes the art and craft of slideshows very seriously, indeed. The app requires Snow Leopard or above, and comes in two versions, Standard ($49) and Advanced ($129), with free trials available for both; the latter supports a wider range of effects and capabilities, as well as professional-grade features like additional motion blur settings and interoperation with Apple’s Aperture.
The Advanced version of PulpMotion comes with roughly 150 templates, whereas the Standard edition comes with 130 or so. As in other apps of the same type, these templates can be used as a sort of blank canvas to which you can add your own pictures and music to create a slideshow. Having so many of them seemed a little gimmicky at first, and, therefore, I spent some time picking-and-choosing my way through the available selection; as it turns out, the templates that come with the app are quite advanced, with visual effects that take full advantage of OS X’s ability to generate complex 3D animations and lighting.
PulpMotion's user interface is easy and convenient to use, with all the important features well organized and within easy reach of even the most inexperienced user.
Kickin’ up your photos
The user interface is simple to use—in most cases, generating a slideshow is a matter of picking media items, such as images or videos, from your hard drive or iPhoto album and dropping them directly on the slideshow’s timeline. PulpMotion takes care of positioning them appropriately and transitioning from one to the other according to whatever rules the template calls for.
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