Photo Story 3 - Import Pictures
You can import pictures from your computer, a network folder, or an MSNŽ Groups Web site. Photo Story 3 can use as many as 300 pictures in a story.
File types can be .bmp, .dib, .eps, .gif, .jhif, .jpe, .jpeg, .jpg, .pcd, .pcx, .png, .psd, .rle, .tga, and .tif
They can be as large as 7200x7200 pixels (52 megapixels)... and as small as 1 pixel.
The standard 4:3 aspect ratio is normal for Photo Story 3. You don't need to prep your pictures before importing. There are features to crop, rotate, fix as needed, and eliminate black borders... most should work fine as is; only a few would need more fixing than you can do with Photo Story.
The trick is to deliberately distort your images before importing... multiply their width in pixels by .75117 (if your resizing app doesn't handle the extra precision, using 75% is close enough).... or their height by 1.3313 (133.13% for higher quality but larger file sizes). Leave the other dimension as is. They'll look kind of squeezed as you work on them in PS3, because you can only work in the standard 4:3 view... but the saved story will look fine.
To get the most from your image's pixels when heading for a widescreen production, use these minimums as rules of thumb for the original images:
When doing stories, more pixels are usually better than fewer.
For help calulating the sizes to distort your images to, download Ted's Widescreen Calculator from the Photo Story Magic channel of vimeo. Scroll down to the Tutorials on the right side for a link to this well done Excel spreadsheet calculator.
Compressed files such as .jpg work easier in Photo Story than uncompressed ones such as .bmp.... this will be noticable in larger more complex stories when you render the story project to a story .wmv file. I do all my prep work in uncompressed formats, but at the last step convert them to .jpg before importing to the project.
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Organizing Digital Pictures
Imported pictures will be sorted the way you have them on your hard drive. Here are
Tips from Yves Alaire about organizing the picture files from your digital camera so you can find them, sorted the way you want.
Newsletter #114 explores these tips in more detail. Click the image to read it.
Newsletters are published weekly to subscribers only, but posted online for open viewing a couple months later. Use this link to the Products and Services page for more info and to subscribe.
Newsletter #146 is about still pictures for story projects... file types, sizes, cropping, fixing, annotating, etc... an assortment of tips and tricks for the typical user.
Photo Story 3 has some effects you can apply, and there is much more you can do to prepare images for use in your movie. Newsletter #78 is about prepping them before importing. Click the image to read it.
Newsletter #96 has more about special effects applied to images before or after import. Click the image to read it.
A scanner is a great source of high quality images... newsletter #82 is a tutorial about scanning a 3-D item (a clock) and using it in a story/movie. Click the image to read it.
Newsletter #141 is about starting with a single professional photo and using it to make the opening of a story and movie...
Newsletter #85 is about the computer memory used when previewing and rendering a story with the maximum of 300 pictures (from a 5 megapixel camera). Click the image to read it.
Selecting and Importing Pictures
Press the import Pictures... button in PS3 to open it's file browser. There are 2 tabs, one for your local hard drives and the other for online pictures in your MSN Groups account.
Pictures of the maiden voyage of 'Friends Good Will' used on this and other Photo Story 3 pages are with the permission of the photographer Ciro A. Mazzola.
Each added picture goes to the end of the filmstrip... if you have lots of pictures, it might be good to decide the sequence before bringing them in. Once on the filmstrip, it's easy to grab one and move it left or right by a few pictures, but moving one a couple hundred places takes more than a few keystrokes.
See the lack of black borders in the above thumbnails in the browser, and the top and bottom black borders when in the PS3 filmstrip. Using the 'Remove black borders... option on this window did a good job of taking care of them all in less than a minute, cropping as needed without distorting the pictures. Do them all as a batch, and then make any changes to individual ones, at this time or later.
Edit... Pressing the Edit.... button under the monitor gets you another working window with 3 tabs.
The third tab includes an option to apply the selected effect to all of the pictures of the story.
Photo Story can be tricked into making widescreen 16:9 aspect ratio stories by using a custom profile.
