• using pictures from digital still cameras... 5 and 7 megapixel
• making the story widescreen at a high definition sized 1280x720 pixels
• streaming from the mydeo hosting service
• including a couple neat special effects we do in movie projects but not in stories... an opening and closing curtain, the sides and top of the curtains as an image overlay throughout the story, and some ever-popular picture-in-picture effects

Here's a link to the result... a 1 minute, 40 second story... I'll be expanding it from here, and using it on the Venice page of my Europe 301 website section. 

• curtains to open at the start and close at the end. I used one of our hotel pictures
• pictures with frames or shapes that could be used as frames... for some quasi-PIP effects. The widescreen stories offer more of an area to use than standard 4:3 aspect ratio ones, making it easy to combine interesting pictures in unusual ways.

As good as it is, Movie Maker in XP fell short on a few key counts…  

• Many video files such as recorded TV and DVDs are in MPEG-2 format. To use them directly in a Movie Maker project, one needs a good MPEG-2 codec that works with Movie Maker. Early on, it was the quest for such a codec… which didn’t succeed. It evolved instead into a matter of how to convert such files to an AVI format that would work in a movie project. The conversion route is much more difficult.

• With the neat options of adding special transitions, effects, and titles to a project, it soon became apparent that saving a movie from a ‘complex’ project often needed more computer memory than was available. If the extra needed was minor, closing down other running apps could free up enough. Adding more RAM or virtual memory would help, but 2 GB of memory seems to be a programmed ceiling, and the only way past it requires subdividing the project and rendering the movie in segments, another difficult task. 

• Movie Maker includes an option to save a movie to a disc, a CD with the movies in WMV format wrapped in a HiMat disc menu structure. Unfortunately, the DVD player manufacturers didn’t add the WMV playing option to stand-alone DVD players. To get movies to standard discs, users had to continue using other disc authoring and burning software.

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About the Video to Story Process

 

Here are some more 'behind the scenes' notes about the steps...

 

Step 1 - select a batch of pictures for the story, copying them to a project-specific folder.

 

I used some of the 5 and 7 megapixel JPG pictures from our trip to Venice.

 

 

Step 2 - plan the sequence and the preps needed to use the images. The key things I opted for were...

• curtains to open at the start and close at the end... just to be cute!! I picked one of our hotel pictures to extract the curtains from.
• pictures with frames or shapes that could be used in Picture-in-Picture type effects. The high definition widescreen stories offer more of an area to use than standard 4:3 aspect ratio ones, making it easy to combine interesting pictures in unusual ways. PIP effects are perennial favorites, ones you don't see used in Photo Story.

 

Step 3 - make the series of still pix for the story... at the 1280x720 pixel size....

 

I used IrfanView and Paint.net in tandem. IrfanView to do the overall cropping and resizing, and Paint.net to put the images together as layers with selected areas being transparent. It's easy, quick, and lots of fun. And it sets the stage for a different kind of story.

 

I open IrfanView and Paint.net and leave them both running... IrfanView to open the JPG files from the camera, crop the selected areas, and resize them to align with the working project in Paint.net. I don't bother to save the images before moving them to Paint.net.

 

When a new picture is ready to add to the project from IrfanView, I copy it to the computer clipboard (Control-C keys), add a new blank layer to the project in Paint.net, and paste the picture into it (Control-V keys). After pasting you can move it around on the layer to position it just right relative to the other layers. 

 

For the full curtain to open and close, I made a layer and painted it with the color of the drapes, picking the color with the eyedropper tool and covering the layer with the paint bucket. You can do better with a more complex color gradient pattern.

 

All images for this story were made in a single Paint.net project file. After making individual layers for curtains, frames with and without the cutout transparent areas, text, etc. I toggled the visible layers on and off as I made BMP images from them, in the sequence I wanted for the story.

 

 

The snapshot above shows 5 of the layers mixed together... the curtains, a window with the central rectangle made transparent, a mask from a street vendor positioned behind the window, the clock of the clock-tower in St Marks square with the round central part erased, and a picture of me shooting video on a layer behind the clock.

 

Toggle the visible layers on and off. When the layers show what you want, use File > Save As > change it to the BMP file type, and save the picture in the folder of images being made for the story. After Paint.net flattens the layers to make the BMP, and the picture is saved, I press the Undo button of the menu to reopen all layers to continue on to arrange the next one.

 

If the Paint.net project gets too large, and your system starts slowing down, make different ones for each part of the story. With my laptop having 2 GB of RAM, I didn't run into that situation.

 

 

Step 4 - distort the set of finished pictures before importing them into Photo Story 3... making their height 133% of the originals. I used the batch process feature of IrfanView.

 

From the full set of prepared pictures, already in the sequence I wanted them in the story, I used the batch process to make another set in a different folder, a set of deliberately distorted pictures.

 

 

Step 5 - import the set of distorted pictures into PS3... drag and drop the whole batch from your file manager into PS3.

 

Save the project file so you can remove the motion settings without having to do them individually... or do them individually if the project is small enough. Close PS3 for a minute while you do the next steps.

 

 

Step 6 - use Mark Coffman's TweakPS to remove all motion settings in one easy stroke...

 

For the special effects of curtains and Picture-in-Picture, the images need to be over each other without any default pans and zooms.

 

 

Step 7 - use TweakPS to also change the default 5 second duration if you want. I left them at 5 seconds, which when reviewing I thought was on the long side. The right setting seems to depend on your mood of the moment. Short quick changes seem to align with today's style, but the number of things going on in parallel on a high definition story like this begs for more viewing time. Not knowing if I wanted them shorter or longer, I left them alone. It's easy enough to use Mark's utility and tweak them again.

 

 

Step 8 - finish editing the story

 

For the curtains opening and closing, use appropriate transitions... I used 'Split, Vertical' for the opening parting ones, and 'Reveal, Down' for the dropping curtain at the end. The picture was the same for each, just applying different transitions. 

 

On the background music page of PS3, add the audio file... I used ambient sounds from my camcorder tape of St. Marks square.

 

Render the story to a draft wmv file and import it into Movie Maker. Add audio and music, and sync the visual and music. When ready to save the music/audio track as a WMA file, delete the video clip and save the movie. It'll be a high quality WMA file for the story.

 

 

Step 9 - save the story using whatever profile you want. I used a custom profile of 1280x720 pixels.

 

 

Step 10 - upload to a server for file downloading or streaming... distribute the link(s). 

 

Here's another copy of the link to the story streaming from the mydeo service. For comparison, here's a link to the same story downloading from my 1&1 hosted website. They play equally well on my laptop at home.