You Too Can Produce Motion Pictures
There’s an easy and free way to turn your digital photographs into a display that goes beyond a simple slide show and into something simulating a motion picture. With a few simple mouse clicks, you can produce a Windows movie file complete with music, narration, captions, zooms, cross fades, pans, and impressive transitions from picture to picture. Your pictures will seem to come to life. And it literally takes only minutes, as all the professional looking effects can be automated by the software.
Microsoft Photo Story 3 is a couple years old now, but not many people know about it. It is freeware that Microsoft gives away as an incentive for running a legal (as opposed to pirated) copy of its XP operating system. In order to install MPS3 on your machine, your PC will first have to pass Microsoft’s Genuine Advantage test, which should be a non-issue for the vast majority of users. The program also requires that you upgrade your version of Windows Media Player to version 10 or 11, which you can get free at the Windows Update web site.
To download this free software simply use your favorite search engine (such as Google) and key “Microsoft Photo Story 3” into the search term box. The search result should display the appropriate Microsoft.com web link. Follow the download instructions and install the software.
I recently went to a retirement celebration where a video montage of the retiree’s career was displayed. Although the video was made up of digital still photographs, animation effects made the still photos take on the look and feel of a movie. The following day I caught up with the fellow who had produced the video and asked him how he did it. He seemed almost apologetic in describing how easy Photo Story 3 was to work with, and in a couple of minutes gave me a brief demo of how it worked on his PC. Needless to say, I went home that evening and downloaded and installed the program. Now I will grant you that I have some experience and facility working with computers, but literally within ten minutes of firing up the program, I had imported a handful of photos of my grandson, attached a suitable MP3 music file, and produced a video complete with all the special effects described above. The beauty of it was that I didn’t have to do a thing to achieve those effects – they were all built right it. I was very impressed,
While it literally took only minutes to produce that first test video, I did spend the next hour exploring, experimenting, and tweaking the resulting file to where I had a product good enough to send out to relatives. Note that the resulting WMV file size can get pretty big. A total of 35 photos plus an MP3 song resulted in a movie that lasted two and a half minutes and consumed five and a half megabytes of disk space.
Using the Program
The first thing you do when you start the program is select the photos you want to use. You simply use a Windows Explorer type of interface to browse to the drive and folder where your photos are stored and select them. The photos are placed on a story board in the program. The story board is a series of thumbnails of your photos. You can drag the photos into the order you want to view them. Next, you can add captions to individual photos if you wish or simply leave them as they are. If you have a microphone attached to your PC, you can record your voice and add narration to individual photos if you like. PC mikes are very inexpensive and plug into your sound card. Next comes the fun part, the animation. This is what makes your photos come alive and take on the look and feel of a movie. The program will take care of this automatically if you like. But you do have the option of choosing length of exposure, style of transition from one photo to the next, and even the start and stop positions of panning and zooming effects. I suggest you take the easy route and let the program do this automatically the first few times until you feel like taking more creative involvement with the process. Finally, you can attach a favorite MP3 music file, or you can choose from among several sound file offerings that come with the software. And that’s it. You click your mouse, and the program blends the photos with the effects and sounds and produces a WMV (Windows movie) file as the output. You then click on the resulting file to see your result. The program will fade the music to end when the video ends, or you can choose to tweak the length of each photo’s exposure to try and align the end of the music with the end of the photo array. Quite honestly, that is what took a major portion of the hour I sent producing my first movie file. I could have been less picky and been done in half the time.
Microsoft Photo Story 3 is cool, it’s free, and it’s easy. And the best part is, YOU can do it. Really! If you’re running Windows XP give it a try. Your audience will be impressed.