Titles

Can't do scrolling titles. For that you'll need to export the slideshow and take it over to iMovie (or Final Cut or any other video editor).

I think Keynote will do scrolling titles as well (and a good bit of other presentation tricks).

That might be true, haven;t used Keynote in a while. But its a bit cumbersome to use to create straight sideshows (at least for me).

If I was doing a straight sideshow I'd definitely go with one of the video options, either opening Apertures .mov file in one of them or else doing it all in the video program.

I never did get use to presentaion software, but that's just me.

The most versatile professional tool I know to create animated titles is Life Type. It comes with the extended Final Cut Pro Package, and offers not only many beautiful fonts but a plethora of animation patterns for scrolling titles or animated sets of letters - dancing or dropping down or spiralling to form a title.

Did you mean LiveType? If so you're right it was a nice bit of software. I got a copy when I got Final Cut Express way back when. Unfortunetly it stopped being included in the Express versions of Final Cut some time ago.

Now with all the changes to Final Cut I don't know what you get anymore.

LiveType?

Yes, that is what I meant; it was included the last time I bought Final cut, but my version dates from 2007. so no chances for an upgrade?

For high quality video you might try Quartz Composer to overlay animated tiles on your slideshow. It comes free with the Developer Tools. But you would have to know a little bit about stream oriented programming to use it efficiently.

To summarize the options:

1. Use one of the basic themes in Aperture (Classic, Ken Burns): This will allow you to insert blank slides with text (from the cog wheel above the film strip); if you set an animated transition effect for these slides and set the duration of the transitions for these slides to a long time (e.g. 3 seconds) you will have some sort of neat animated title, very similar to what you can do in Keynote.
2. Render the Aperture Slideshow as Quicktime movie and add titles and other effects in a video editor (iMovie, Final Cut, etc. )
3. Create the whole Slideshow with presentation software (Keynote, PPT) or a video editor
4. Create an animated Title Video clip (with Keynote, iMovie, POVray, Quartz Composer, ...) and import that into your Aperture Slideshow to use as an animated title.

Pros and Cons:

1. Pro: You can do it completely in Aperture and the titles do fit in well with the theme of your slideshow. And you can present your slideshow from within Aperture and do not have to render a quicktime movie. Con: doesn't work with the more advanced themes, no relally spectacular title animations available
2. Pro: This will certainly work, and you will have advanced and spectacular titles animations. con: you will loose the ability to present your slideshow from within Aperture and you have less control when presenting it as movie; the rendering takes a very long time and the rendered movie eats up your disk space; you will have to render the movie over and over again, if you want to add or remove slides.
3. Pro: In Keynote or Powerpoint you can present your show from within the application like in Aperture, no need to render a movie; con: external to Aperture
4. Pro: more advanced Titles, while still keeping the slideshow with Aperture, no need to render a movie, more control over the presentation. con: you need a video processor or ray tracer

My favorite approach is a mixture of 1 and 4; I like to insert text slides with a little text animation and use a ray tracer like quartz composer or POVray to create advanced animations that I import as video clips into the slide show.

Did I forget something?

-- Léonie

Take a look at Keynote. _I_ like it. After having to remove my brain, roll it into doughy lengths, tangle them all up, and then put it all back in order to make a slidehow with iMovie, Keynote was very much a refreshingly direct "chute, splash, done". It is -- like iPhoto -- not comprehensive -- but it is -- also like iPhoto -- within reach, straightforward, and well-stocked with standard effects.

You don't need (or least didn't need last time I used it) a video processor or ray tracer to use any of the many and satisfactory built-in animation effects. If your slideshow is mostly static slides of photographs, Léonie's #4 sounds like a very good (and simple) way to go. If you are creating a presentation to accompany a talk/lecture/lesson, then I would craft the whole thing in Keynote as it allows much more control of the audience's attention.