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Raw Bytes Computer News KPBX FM 91.1 Radio National Public Radio Network Frank Delaney Producer Broadcast on Wednesday Morning 7:35 AM During Morning Edition Support Public Radio ! The Theater Of the Mind |
In computer news
this week 09/16/2009 With those summer vacation pictures, you need to make some good movies ... Part 5 Anyone
who owns a digital camera and a pc today has a dilemma. Once you take those
pictures, how do you share them with your friends and relations? Now
if you have a paper mentality you automatically take your camera – or the
memory chip in it - to some photo
processing place and wait to get prints made, and mail them to friends and relatives.
So you make two trips in your car. If
you’re a little less computer phobic you know you can email your photos
to an online service like Snapfish.com
which will develop your photos and send them to your local Walgreens drug
store, so you only have to make one trip in your car. But
if you’re of the digital computer mentality, you know that you don’t
have to develop your pictures; you know they’re ready to be shared
online, and you just have to determine the best method for doing that. And that’s what this Raw Bytes
mini-series on making good movies from your pictures is all about. You
already have in your pc the free Microsoft program named moviemaker,
which the past 5 shows have focused on, and which you can read online on my
website, see screens of how-to-do-information that I talked about, and see
the actual movies produced. This
show is about a hidden Microsoft gem also for making movies
– Photostory 3..
which isn’t in your computer, but which you can download free from
Microsoft. Photostory
3 is an older program for making movies, but it has some unique features that
moviemaker doesn’t have, which you might be interested in. Both
moviemaker and Photostory allow you to make slideshows of your movies, share
them online, and burn dvd’s of them. You
will need to download Photostory from the Microsoft site, and then it easily
installs on your computer and creates an icon on your desktop. It works differently than moviemaker
and to me it requires more advance thinking and storyboarding of what you
want to do in your online slideshow, but it does have some nice unique
features. Click
on the Photostory icon on your desktop, and choose Begin a new Story.
The
first thing it has you do is import your pictures, so you have to know where
on your computer they reside.
Once
you import the pictures you want, click next and you’re given the
chance to caption them, or just skip this by clicking on next.
You
can also choose to do an audio narration of your slide show if you have a
microphone hooked up to your computer, or just skip this by clicking on next.
Finally
you can add a music sound track to your slideshow, and again you have to know
where on your computer it resides.
Next
you select Save your story for playback on your computer, and it creates a .wmv
file – the same format that moviemaker uses – on your computer.
Finally
you select Save project and give it a name, so that you can retrieve and
re-edit it again if desired.
Now
you have a complete Photostory movie made, and you can click on it and view
it on your computer. I
named this movie kpbxpikeplace.wmv, it has pictures of my Seattle vacation
this year and visit to Pike Place Market, and the soundtrack is a country
blues instrumental I play on my guitar. and it’s about 5 megs in size. Now
comes the critical part of sharing this movie with your friends….. You
don’t – repeat DON’T - be an internet road hog by emailing
this movie to everyone in your address book. Instead,
you upload the movie to your Facebook, Myspace or personal web page, and then
send an email to the people you would like to see this movie with a link to
your movie in the email, and invite them to view it, if they want to. And
you can go to my Raw Bytes webpage and read this transcript – see all
the screens I’ve talked about how to create your Photostory movie, and
then view this movie on your computer. This
is the new way of sharing your summer vacation pictures with your friends and relations. |
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For Raw
Bytes This is
Frank Delaney (C) 2009
MTA Micro Technology Associates http://www.mtamicro.com/kpbx.html PO Box
31522 Spokane, Wa 99223-1522 (509)624-7230 |
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