As you may have heard, if you upgrade to both Aperture 3.1 and iLife ‘11, you gain all the exciting new slideshow themes that Steve showed on stage for iPhoto ‘11—inside of Aperture! I’ve just installed mine, and there’s a load of new themes.

New Slideshow Themes

Here’s the Aperture 3.1 New Slideshow dialog with iLife ‘09 installed…

And the same dialog after installing iLife ‘11…

Here’s a complete list of Slideshow themes. Themes with the ** next to them are new… there’s six of ‘em!

1. Classic
2. Holiday Mobile **
3. Ken Burns
4. Origami **
5. Photo Edges
6. Photo Mobile **
7. Places **
8. Reflections **
9. Scrapbook
10. Shatter
11. Sliding Panels
12. Snapshots
13. Vintage Prints **
14. Watercolor Panels

I’ll point out that the “Mobile” themes aren’t “mobile, as in portable, as in your mobile phone”, but are “mobile, as in that thing you hang over a baby’s crib to entertain them while you make dinner”. Example…

Slideshow Settings & Publishing

This far into writing this post, I figured I may as well just make a slideshow! So I went ahead and added a few more photos, dragged in a couple of default audio tracks, and made myself a wee little movie. However I had a spot trouble getting this video onto YouTube. From Aperture, you can choose the YouTube preset, but that renders it at 640 x 360 (ew, gross… SD!), and it doesn’t upload it automatically anyway…

…so I figured I’d go for the gold and output a 1080p movie:

That resulted in a kinda-big movie file (as you would expect):

671.4 MB! Yowzers… but hey, QuickTime has its own Publish to YouTube command, right? So I figured I’d just use that.

Well, either YouTube or QuickTime are having a bad day, or this just doesn’t work with such high-rez movies, because I tried it three times with two different size movies, and it never completed. Every time I watched it encode (presumably a lighter-weight version), upload, and then report that “YouTube was processing video”. That never ended, and my YouTube page never showed anything up there processing. So I ultimately gave up on that.

Of course you can upload directly to YouTube through the website, but I wanted to encode this a bit smaller first, and not upload such a massive movie. So, I went back to Aperture to create a smaller file. The standard preset HD 1080p (as in the screenshot above) outputs, as you saw, quite a large file. And notice that the estimated file size is absolute rubbish—according to Aperture, it was going to be ~173.0 MB. Yet it was nearly four times larger, at 671.4 MB. So I moved to Custom, and tried a few things, and ultimately ended up with the following settings.

Notice I also lowered the frame rate to 24p. Yes, 30p (the default) would be smoother. No, there’s no video in this slideshow so I’m not getting a “filmic look” to it. But 24p is 20% less frames, therefore 20% less data than 30p—and it looks great. I tested out qualities Best, High and Medium, and determined that (at least for this slideshow), Best and High were nearly indistinguishable, but Medium suffered a bit. I do understand that YouTube re-encodes once it has a file in its claws, so if you have mega-bandwidth to spare, go ahead and send up a larger file. I have a good connection but it’s not light-speed, so the High quality, 1080p24 movie did it for me just fine, weighing in at 248.2 MB.

I uploaded that through the YouTube web interface, and that’s all she wrote.

Sample Slideshow Movie

Here you go, a sample of the “Photo Mobile” theme. Remember it’s uploaded in full 1080p, so go ahead and play ‘er full screen!