The picture at the right is a link to a 2++ minute story made from my oldest book, an 1804 school text about arithmetic. Click the image to play it.

Starting with another old book... this one a history book from 1865... I used Photo Story and Movie Maker to take selected text from the book and mix other things with it... audio, video clips... pictures. The picture below/left is a link to the 9+ minute video.

The markings were of the digital pictures, not the book. The only harm to the old books was a one time scanning.

Widescreen High Definition Stories

High quality, even high definition sized, widescreen stories can be made from still pictures or snapshots from video clips, and uploaded to a website for online viewing using little bandwidth.

Here's a link to a high def story of 1280x720 pixels made from a single still picture, the skyline of New York City at night. The image at the right is a link to another New York themed widescreen story of 1920x1080 pixels. Stories need only a small fraction of the bandwidth that movies use, so many broadband users can view ones of this size smoothly.

Newsletter #131 is a tutorial about making such a story from still pictures. Click the image to read it.

from Video to Story

The image at the right is a link to a sample story showing a sunset, made from a series of still pictures extracted from a camcorder tape using frame snapshots...

my best-to-date story with animation

The jellyfish at the right is a link to a two minute story. Those who see it don't believe it's made with Photo Story from still pictures.

The steps to make it are in the opening title picture.

Custom Speed Changes

Here's a downloadable special effect for XP systems that makes it easy to grab frame snapshots at 5 second intervals from a video, using Movie Maker 2 and a video utility.

Download the xml file, put it in your Movie Maker\Shared\AddOnTFX folder, and the next time you startup MM2, you'll have these two custom speed up effects.

Apply it to the clip you want the snapshots from, and save it to a high quality wmv file to automatically deinterlace it. You can then use a video utility to extract each frame as a still picture, for use in a story. I use TMPGEnc and save the frames as BMP images. Other software such as VirtualDub can do it also, if you save the movie as a DV-AVI file.

Photo Story 3 Templates

Photo Story doesn't include any in the software installation package, and doesn't mention them in the help file.

What's a Photo Story 3 template? To me it's a saved story (.wp3 file) that you've put lots of work into... tweaking each of the pictures individually to get the right durations, transition durations and styles, motion settings, and effects... and it's the kind of story that you know you'll be doing again someday. But you would like to avoid having to do all that individual picture tweaking over again.

It's time to consider making your own or using someone else's template. I'll kick the subject off by introducing the idea and sharing my first template, one that produces a map marked up to depict the travel path.

Using a template often involves tweaking the existing files in the project. This is made poossible by Photo Story creating a new temporary folder c:\Documents and Settings\User\Local Settings\Temp\(project file name)\ with copies of the project files in it. The temp folder is created when you open the project and is erased when you close it. While it's open, here's your change to change the temporary files however you want. Modify the existing ones or substitute totally different ones.

Once changed, they will flow back into the project when you re-save the current project or save it with a new name.