Wondershare’s DVD slideshow Builder Deluxe is marketed as an all in one solution for creating and publishing a DVD slideshow of your own personal photos and videos.

There are many reasons you would want to do this; special occasions such as weddings, promotional materials for a business or group, holiday snaps, or just because!  With the age of digital media upon us it’s no wonder that products such as this are gaining popularity.  Mac users have been able to do this for quite some time using the included iLife suite of applications, but now Wondershare is bringing this particular slice of the market to Windows based PC’s, and our impressions of it are that they’ve done a pretty good job!

Downloading and installing the application is pretty painless, it’s simply a case of visiting the product page on Wondershare’s website and then following the instructions to purchase and download the software.  There’s even an option to try a free version for 30 days so that you can decide if this is a product you will find useful.  Once downloaded, it’s the familiar Windows installation wizard to get you up and running, there shouldn’t be any surprises as Wondershare are marketing this product as compatible with XP, Vista and Windows 7.

If you’ve sprung for the deluxe version then you’ll be presented with a screen on start-up asking if you wish to run the software in standard or advanced mode.  Standard restricts you to using photos only, and provides you with less options for editing and less “bells and whistles” to play around with.  This would be useful if you want to make a simple slide-show presentation in a hurry, it’ll even throw in a (seemingly random) theme and transitions to get you on your way, from there you can change the timings and transitions between photos to your liking.  The video below is an example of what happens if you select a series of photos in Standard mode, all that was done to create this video was to upload some photos and then simply save the result as a video file.  In reality, you would do some further editing and add things like credits and a soundtrack before publishing, but this demonstrates perfectly how powerful the software is.

***EDIT – There are now two videos, one is the original video I made, the other includes a soundtrack but is not available in all countries due to copyright law***

If you elect to use the advanced mode then you get a lot more options at your disposal; your presentation can also include video, you have complete control over slide transitions and you can add your own voice-over and opening/closing credits as well.  It’s an all together more powerful set of tools, though to be honest it will take you a fair amount of time to be able to produce something as impressive as the automated slideshows sometimes generated in Standard mode.

The amount of options available to you is nothing short of mind boggling, and I’m sure that most users will spend hours fine tuning their products by adjusting the themes, transitions, titles, cropping, grouping, zooming, scrolling, annotating and trimming of their precious memories into something to be proud of.  That being said, although incredibly fruitful in terms of options (way more in fact than Apple’s iLife suite has to offer), the interface rarely feels cluttered and anyone who has a small amount of experience in video editing will feel completely at home with the interface.  Of course, there’s no need to go overboard, your project can be as basic or as advanced as you desire, which makes this product suitable for just about any scenario you can think of.  The video above demonstrates how a project can be filled with pretty effects and transitions, but it’s equally possible (in fact, it’s easier) to create a very simple and elegant slide-show should you desire one.

Once you’ve created your slideshow, you have a number of options for what to do with it, Wondershare have included a built in editor for creating menu structures for DVD’s should you wish to burn your project to a disk, this has a similar look and feel to iDVD on a Mac, and as with the creation tools is very intuitive.  If you don’t wish to burn to a DVD, then there are a number of other options included.  You can save the project as a video file on your computer in either standard definition or HD, you can save the show in a file format suitable for an Apple device such as an iPhone or iPad, or you can save in a file format that can be played back on other mobile devices such as phones or PDA’s.

In short, Wondershare are offering some tremendous opportunities to be creative, the deluxe version of this software is possibly the only tool you could need to create slideshows that make the memories that matter to you last a lifetime.  Not only that, but the price is well below what you would expect to pay for software of this quality (and with this many features).  There are invariably features of this software that I am yet to discover, such is the depth of content that’s included out of the box.  It’s quite possible to get completely lost in your projects, though only as a result of the immense amount of options available, at all times the interface remains manageable, and each individual scene on the timeline can be edited independently which allows you to break complex projects down into their components simply and quickly.  The “storyboard” view can become essential when working with big projects, though some experienced video-editors may find the “timeline” view more familiar.  In both instances it’s simply a case of “drag and drop” to insert amazing effects into your slideshows.

Wondershare have priced the deluxe version of the software at $69.95, but if that’s too rich for you, the standard version is available for $49.95.  Both versions can be purchased and downloaded from Wondershare’s website:

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EDIT:  The standard edition of DVD Slideshow Builder is now available to download for FREE from Wondershare, here.