Using Photo Story for Windows

gregh

electronics, computers and scratchbuilding
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I don?t know if this has been covered before, but MS Photo Storey is a free download that allows you to load a series of pictures and turn them into a slide-show movie file (wmv).
The wmv file can then be loaded into MS Movie Maker file and incorporated into other ?real? movies..
I have the XP version, but I think a Win7 version is available.

I know that mightn?t sound too exciting but a feature I like is the ability to zoom in/out/around a picture. Here?s an example of what I mean.
Say I have picture of a number of my locos like this, and I want to zoom in onto a couple of them.
(it really should be a higher resolution pic!)
118f64bf79dc43fd80c11122bb50bdc7.jpg

You can see the effect I?m describing after I converted it to a wmv file here:
http://youtu.be/KVfqnk2mfq4

I know you could do a similar thing with a video camera, but my simple ?still? camera doesn?t allow zooming whilst filming.

Here?s how I did it.
I loaded the same picture into Photo Story 7 times.
Then I set the 1st slide to show the whole pic for 5 seconds by ticking ?set end position to be same as start position?.
In the 2nd slide I selected a transition from whole slide zooming down to end on the blue Garratt in 5sec by ticking ? set start position to be same as end position of previous picture?, and then dragged the box to the new position over the Garratt.
For the 3rd slide I wanted to remain on the same position for 5 seconds, so I ticked ?set end position to be same as start position? again.
For the 4th slide I wanted to zoom across to the green loco in the centre, so I dragged the end position box to be over the loco. I selected a 3 sec transition for this as it is not moving as far as the first move.
The 5th slide remains the same; as per the 3rd slide.
The 6th slide transitions to the Tram as per 2nd slide, and
The 7th slide remains on the tram.

On every slide I ticked ?specify start and end position of motion?, and selected Transition Tab and UNticked ?start current picture with a transition?.

Unfortunately you can?t put captions on the ?zoomed? sections as the words always cover the whole slide. I put a caption on the first slide only as it was ?full size?. But you can add captions in Movie Maker which is what I did for the 3rd and 4th captions in the video.

Anyone else got any other ideas for using Photo Story?
 
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