photo story

Microsoft Photo Story is a free application that allows users to create a visual story (show and tell presentation) from their digital photos. The software uses the Ken Burns Effect on digital photos and allows adding narration, effects, transitions and background music to create a Windows Media Video movie file with pan and zoom effects. Once a photo story has been made, it can be played on a PC using Windows Media Player. Since the .wmv format is used, Windows Media Video Image (a sub-set of Windows Media Video) is incompatible with domestic DVD players, users wishing to create a DVD or CD will need to use third-party tools to convert into DVD compatible (e.g. MPEG 2) format first.
Version 2 was included in Microsoft Plus! Digital Media Edition and Microsoft Digital Image Suite versions 9 and 10. It supported exporting the photo story as a Video CD. Version 3.0, although still a free download from Microsoft, removed direct Video CD burning, but supported a paid-for add-on from Sonic Solutions for exporting and burning the photo story to DVD.
The final free download version (3.0) includes the ability to randomly generate background music which is composed on the fly from a combination of themes and also includes basic photo editing and touchup features.The last version of Photo Story (3.1) was included with the discontinued Microsoft Digital Image 2006. It restored the ability to burn a Video CD using the Sonic Burning engine.
To burn CDs or DVDs from files generated by version 3.0, users may purchase Sonic MyDVD DVD burning software or the Sonic DVD for Photo Story 3 for Windows plug in (which burns one DVD per Story). Third party tools, such as Media Coder, often do a very poor (low quality) job of converting Photo Story wmv files - Windows Movie Maker does a far better job of converting into an intermediate .avi format (although this will be some 30 times larger than the original wmv) which many DVD Authoring packages will accept as input. The final DVD compatible MPEG2 file size will typically be 5 to 6 times larger than the original .wmv file (or about 6 times smaller than the avi).

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