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In computer news this week  08/19/2009

 

 

With those Summer vacation photos you’ve taken, you need to make some good movies ...

 

The internet has opened up a whole new way of communicating with friends and relatives, and now when you take lots of pictures on your vacation, there’s new ways to share your photos with everyone you know.

 

How did we do this in the past?

Let’s see, first we’d take the pictures on our film cameras, come home and take the film to a film developer service, wait for it to be done, and  then go pick up the pictures. Then we’d go through all the pictures we’d taken, and then we’d pick out the ones we liked the best, and then we’d take those pictures  back to the film developer service to have multiple prints made, and pick them up again. Then we’d mail them to uncle Arthel and aunt Nellie and of course grandpa and grandma, and hope that they didn’t get lost in the mail.

 

Today digital cameras have eliminated all that. You take the pictures – they’re already developed, and you decide what you want to keep and share with others. It’s easy to put your pictures in a slide show or movie, title them, add a music sound track even, and share them through the internet.

 

There’s 2 great programs to let you do this, they’re both free; and they’re both from Microsoft – meaning these programs are white bread –  whatever you create with them is going to be instantly viewable on all windows-based computers in the world, and even apples that can emulate windows.  This is an important point to realize, because there is other slide show or movie making software, but sometimes the person trying to view the movie has to have the same software as you.

 

Windows moviemaker – available in windows Xp, Vista and the coming Windows 7 operating system has the capability of  creating easy-to-do slide shows or movie,  titling capability, fancy  transition capability so that you can do fancy fadeouts or wipes or page turns between scenes, special video effects like shooting in that old time sepia color, other graphics tricks, and sound capability so that you can add a soundtrack to your slide show or movie. In other words, it has the whole enchilada.

 

Another free program is photostory3 for windows - but you won’t find it on your computer.  You do have to go to the Microsoft site on the internet – www.microsoft.com – and do a search for it, or read my transcript online and go right to the download page. Microsoft requires you to validate that you have a legitimate copy of windows – which is easy to do – and then you can download it.

 

Here I want to make my point again of how you don’t want to be an internet road hog…….

 

All internet provider services – from AOL down to your tiny local ISP – give you your own personal website space – so that you can put your pictures and movies online on the internet – and then you send people you think would be interested in viewing them an email with a link to your pictures, so that they have the option of viewing them or not !!!

 

You DO NOT ATTACH YOUR 80 MB MOVIE TO AN EMAIL AND SEND IT TO YOUR MASS MAILING LIST OF FRENDS AND RELATIVES !!!!

 

Uncle Arthel with his 56K Dialup connection is going to be very unhappy when he has to spend the next 2 weeks downloading your video ………. And you may think Junior is cute in that picture, but Aunt Nellie might be repulsed by what she sees as a leering gargoyle …

 

More how to do all this next week.

 

 

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This is Frank Delaney

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