Photo Story 3 for Windows

By Merle Nicholson, Tampa PC Users Group
merle@merlenicholson.com

Photo Story 3 is a program that creates movies from your collections of digital photos. It’s kind of a slideshow, like Ken Burns does for PBS. If your target platform is a PC, Pocket PC or a new Palm, it creates a Windows Media Video file (.wmv). It also will create DVD’s to be played on a TV and for Windows Media PC. And the results are nothing short of spectacular.

Photo Story 3 is a free download from Microsoft. Yes, it’s free. The previous version, Photo Story 2, is still distributed on the Windows Plus! CD, along with other things, and of, course, that’s not free at all.

There’s only one catch. It’s a $20 catch, and one that I bumped into early: If you want to make a DVD that will play in a standard DVD player, you need your own software for the creation of the DVD. I was unable to get my copy of Nero OEM to do that, but I did purchase a plug-in for PS3 that did all I needed. More about that later.

There are excellent tutorials on the Microsoft website, with more information than you’ll ever need. I highly recommend looking at those. It’s where I found the reference to the Sonic site where I bought the plug-in. All these are in the links section of this article.

Now for the program. If you do these following simple steps and did nothing else, you’ll just love the results.

Collect all the pictures you want in your slideshow, preferably in a single folder, but if they are scattered around, you can deal with that inside the program, too. Step two, open the program and read in the pictures. Step three, move the pictures along the picture strip to get them in the order you want. Step four, pull in some music you’ve ripped from an audio CD, point the start of the music to the first picture, then look down the pictures to see where the music ends, and repeat the same music, or point to another. Step five, save the project in a file because you’ll want to come back later. And last, step six, create the movie. For the first save, I’d create a movie file to be run on a PC at, say, 1024x768. When it’s done, run the movie.

Everyone knows about Ken Burns’ wonderful series on the Civil War for PBS, in which he used a technique on all the still photos where he panned through the picture and zoomed in or out of the photo to a point of interest to create a sense of motion. He may not have invented the idea, but his name became synonymous with the technique. I can remember being entranced with the impact of this when it came out.

Photo Story 3 does this pan and zoom on every picture by default. It’s wonderful. And the funny thing is, it must be done randomly. It certainly can’t know of the content of the picture to do it intelligently. So after you’ve created your first show and maybe looked at it twice, then is the time to go back into the saved project and go to each slide and change the motion so that the motion fits into the context of the picture. Some pictures you’ll want to have no motion at all, and perhaps some you may want to repeat the picture so that you can zoom out after zooming in.

I told a friend about this program, and he put together a movie of about six pictures and one song. He said he did it in about five minutes. Just did pretty much what I described above. He emailed it to me, and it was just excellent. And he was extremely happy with it.

For my own 20 minute project with 165 photos, it took three minutes to create a file for my pocket PC. For a file to be played at 1024x768, it took seven minutes. It surprised me how long it took since I have a very powerful dual-core processor. So if you have an older computer, I’d be prepared for a long final creation time.

The program has a very wide range of options that I’ll try to summarize: You can crop the pictures, rotate, color correct, remove red eye, annotate with titles on each, record voice for each, create music and edit each photo with 10 effects like sepia color, black and white, watercolor and negative.

Now for the rest of the stuff. The program is written to be a kind of a wizard with five panels. The panels’ functions are:

  1. Import and arrange your pictures (color correction, red eye, rotate, crop, add 10 effects)
  2. Add a title to your pictures (Add text and arrange on the photo)
  3. Narrate your pictures and customize motion (Yes, add voice annotations or narrations)
  4. Add background music (Select music, create music)
  5. Save your story

On “Save your story for playback on your computer,” you have a very wide range of options. You have file, DVD and CD (VCD) formats and a variety of screen resolutions for each.

For creating DVDs to play on a home DVD player, I can recommend the plug-in from Sonic. There’s a link to it from the Microsoft site, but it’s listed on the Sonic site too.

I’ve made three versions of my particular project: for PC playback, DVD player and for Pocket PC. The file size for the PC version is 77MB at 1024x768. This is for 20 minutes and 165 pictures. For the Pocket PC it’s 23MB at 240x320. The saved project file is 338MB.

There’s a lot of information on this program on the Microsoft website that’s worth looking at.

Here are the links:

Download details Photo Story 3 for Windows: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=92755126-a008-49b3-b3f4-6f33852af9c1&DisplayLang=en

Sonic plug-in to PS3: http://www.sonic.com/products/Consumer/PhotoStory/

Tutorial step-by-step Burn a Photo Story to DVD and Play It On Your TV:  http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/knowledgecenter/howto/DigCameraPhotostorytoDVD_StepByStep.aspx

Microsoft Photo Story 3 for Windows make show-n-tell cool again: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/digitalphotography/photostory/default.mspx

Microsoft Windows Media Workshops: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/knowledgecenter/workshops/default.aspx u