I don’t like ordinary-person presentations with music added. Just one slide after another, please. Narration by the author is good. Captions are good. I use an editor to put captions within the jpeg files so they’re there no matter what means of displaying I use (Shutterfly, Nero, etc).
Speaking of Nero, I swear it loses a little resolution when it displays my pictures. I’ve never found good documentation for Nero MediaHome.
Several years ago, I made a video slide show on my family’s history that featured one slide after another, some with captions, and arranged in chronological order. First, I had some film slides from the 1940’s and 1950’s transferred to VHS video at a camera shop. Then I copied them onto another tape using a high-end VCR that allowed me to add music—in this case, popular songs from the period in which the slides were taken—and titles as well as captions, using a Videonics character generator. Although this was time-consuming, the production was a success.
This was, of course, an analog production using technology which is now obsolete. I have not yet mastered digital video production, but I hope to do so and do similar projects in the future.