Movies from Digital Photos with Photo Story 3
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Photo Story 3 is a free program that will make movies from your digital photos. You can download Photo Story from Microsoft’s website. That’s right, I said Free. And, I also said Microsoft. Those are two words that normally don’t go together!
Take advantage of it. This is a great program. It takes your digital still photos and turns them into a movie, complete with movement, music, and narration. Here’s a sample using photos we took at the Grand Canyon. Notice how the images pan left and right or zoom in and out, it feels like you’re watching a video when it’s actually still photos. You can use music clips from your library, or you can let Photo Story 3 compose the music for you. Notice how the music even ends right on time!
This links to a .wmv file, it may take a minute to download. PCs will play it using Windows Media Player. If you’re using a Mac, you may need to download a Media Player.
Another example is located on our website - this one is of one of our favorite RV parks and it includes some narration. It was uploaded to Google Video and should play on any computer.
We mostly think of Photo Story 3 for taking our travel photos and making a nice show. Adding some other graphics, and plenty of narration, you can create any kind of presentation. Here is an introduction to Geeks on Tour created completely in Photo Story 3. This one has been converted to Flash and should be viewable by any computer if you have the Flash player installed.
Of all the seminars we teach, Photo Story 3 is the easiest - you’ll find the class handout at the bottom of the Geeks on Tour Articles page. Just gather your photos together, and follow the wizard in the program. You’ll LOVE it.
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Photo Story is XP only
Great ideas! Thanks. XP only is good for me.
Photo Story 3 works just fine on my Vista computer.
You might also want to take a look a ProShow. It costs $70 while Photo Story 3 is free but I have found it much easier to use and it has many more options (input and output formats) making it well worth the money. There is a free 15 day trial available to let you check it out.
For the Grand Canyon National Park 2004, only the audio gets through on a Mac running OS 10.4.11 with either Windows Media Player 9.0 (for Mac) or the latest available Safari Plugin. The error message from WMP is “This file may not play correctly because it was compressed by using a codec that is not supported.” Same problem trying to run it with VLC.
Peace River & the Geeks on Tour intro both run fine.
Jon,
Thanks for the feedback on Macintosh viewing. Guess my next post needs to be how to share these on the web so all can see?! If you could, please try to view the copy at http://picasaweb.google.com/chrisguld/Videos/ and let me know if you can hear AND see?
Maybe MS hasn’t updated their site but it says systems requirements are
Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition, Windows XP Professional, Windows XP Media Center Edition, or Windows XP Tablet PC Edition.
Though I am not the person you requested to go to picasa, I was able to view the movie and hear the music on my Mac desktop. The movie was a little grainy but otherwise looked and sounded great.
[...] you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!Last week I told you about Photo Story 3, a great way to make a movie from your photos. But, once you get the [...]
[...] If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to our E-mail Digest. We will then send you the stories that are posted each day in an e-mail digest. We use a service called Feedburner for delivery of these emails. You will receive an e-mail from Feedburner after you subscribe and you must click on that email to activate your subscription. Thanks for visiting and enjoy all the information! RV.Net Blog AdminWhen you need a home office, and you live in a motorhome, you need to make some modifications. We’ve been living and working in our 30 ft class C for almost 5 years now. I’ve compiled some photos and put together a slide show/video of how we customized it to include 2 computer offices. You should see a Youtube video below. I’ll let the video tell you the rest. btw - this video is made using Photo Story 3 which I introduced in a previous post. [...]
Eat a third and drink a third and leave the remaining third of your stomach empty. Then, when you get angry, there will be sufficient room for your rage.
[...] Photo Story 3. It’s a free program from Microsoft and I’ve written about it in this previous article. After making the movie, I then uploaded it to Google Video so it can be shared with the world. You [...]