Ulead, Pinnacle or Adobe

Pinnacle Studio 9, I only use it to do picture show

I have both PremiereE and Pinnacle 9 plus. While PremiereE is more powerful and professional, it has a steep learning curve and can crash on you at any minute.

Pinnacle is powerful, more intuitive to work with, and has loads of cool effects and stuff.

I bought Studio10plus Titanium. Tried to install but the 2nd CD is damaged, so I have to exchange it. :-(

Pinnacle is very buggy, especially when dealing with longer videos. I had random crashes every 30 minutes it seemed, lockups, and problems with audio video sync. I even partitioned my HD and made a clean windows install only for Pinnacle but that didnt help either. This was using Pinnacle 8 with the latest patch but i have heard the newer onces are just as buggy at times

Studio 9 is buggy! Yes, when i first got it, it was a pain to render videos. Hours lost until I found the proper patch version that would not give me crashes... If you ever use Studio, make sure to test your version... If that version works without problems etc. etc., never ever upgrade, no matter what. at least that's my advice, about something that happened to me. Of course, never used on my computer. When I finally bought for me, I got Premiere, but, as said before, Studio is more intuitive.

I use Pinnacle 8.{something}. Works fine.

Pinnacles stuff is way to buggy... ON SEVERAL occasions I have worked on projects to just have Studio close on me with no errors or anything and loose all the work.

Ulead stuff is okay but seems to have to many seperate apps to work out off.

Premiere Elements and Pro are both EXCELLENT! I use Premiere Pro and Vegas.

Yeah Pinnacle is just awful. I have used Vegas since 4.0 and it has served me extremely well through many projects with no real bugs to speak of, and has a tiny learning curve compared to Adobe products, yet is still full featured enough to do anything I want. It is also a stand alone audio editor to boot.

Sorry for sidetracking a bit. s1999, Ive been a fan of Vegas since 4.0 also, but while Vegas is one powerful package that leaves much of premiere/after effects redundant, I havent found a clean way of making a slideshow in it. I mean, you can sequence pictures manually, but for 30+ pictures it is annoying. So I use the slideshow generator in Nero. Do you have a trick up your sleeve for Vegas? For instance a mass fade in fade out generator for all items in timeline?

There is a Slideshow to Markers script (requires .NET runtime) for Vegas, which I initially wrote for Vegas 4 beta, I believe. The script now lives its own life and should probably be available from VASST site. You basically put markers on timeline and have folder selected in your media browser, run the script, and voila. If I remember correctly it uses default transition. If you are not able to find it and really interested, let me know the version of Vegas (later Vegas changes namespaces for .NET classes) and I'll try to resurrect the script.

Best photo slideshow software, my rec'dation

As a serious video and photo hobbyist I own or have used almost every consumer product on the market at some time or another (Avid Express DV, Premiere 6 to Pro 2, Pinnacle Studio and Edition); so this recommendation is based on real life experience and meeting deadlines. For purely video slide show projects I very highly recommend ProShow Gold by Photodex. I found this in a discussion on a Nikon photo forum a couple years ago, and it's only sold online as far as I know. You can download a free trial at www.photodex.com. The workflow and tools for creating a very high quality show with Ken Burns pan/zoom, along with titling and sound synchro are outstanding. You need to practice some as a few settings, especially in soundtrack offsets, or rippling changes are confusing by description but very powerful when you understand what it does. (the ability to change overall length proportional to current slide timing is my favorite feature) I usually render, then assemble the slide shows in a DVD authoring program like MyDVD for burning, tho it will burn itself. This software is very reliable and I've created many a show at the last minute w/o worrying about crashing during rendering, no matter how many images and regardless of image size/resolution. (try that w/ Pinnacle) If you want to throw slides in, synch to a single track, and be done, this may or may not be the best for you - there are several consumer products you'll be happy with. But if you want ultimate control over every parameter, something consumer slideshow products lack, then this is for you - try it out. (I don't work for Photodex, just really like this product)

I used to use Ulead Photoshow. It work good for standard transition. I am now a Sony kindda guy.
Though product from photodex looks very interesting, haven't give them a try yet.