Link to Part 1.
Back from Scotland I decided to start putting together my slide show using Microsoft Photo Story 3. My wife and I went through the 400+ stills and videos to pick the relevant shots that best describe our time in Scotland. I started the insert process to find that I could not insert Mpeg video clips. Photo Story 3 does so much for you in picking transitions between shots, adding zoom and pan to still pictures, and creating an electronic music soundtrack. It really is incredibly easy to use, however in its quest to minimize the amount of options Microsoft left out what I think is a extremely important feature: the ability to insert video, In order to insert video I had to export the photo story to a Windows Media file (.wmv) and import it into another simple to use free program; Movie Maker which is included in Windows XP SP2, . With Movie Maker I was able to easily insert Mpeg videos, add titles and manipulate the soundtrack. However the quality of the still images with zoom and pan degraded considerably when compared to the video content. This made the end product look rather fuzzy, I was not satisfied with the results and went looking for other solutions.
After a quick search, I found that there were only a two solutions that seem to integrate still pictures and videos. The recently released Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0 and Apple's iPhoto/iVideo. I went to our local Apple store to check out iPhoto and iVideo, the products look good, however they are not that intuitive to use. Apple does an outstanding job in the industrial design of both product and user interface, however the function flow in their application leaves a lot to be desired. Maybe if you are an Apple aficionado it makes sense, but the mouse control and menu nomenclature is not intuitive. I am very intrigued by the Intel Mac (it really was a brilliant decision on Apple's part) and being able to boot both Windows and Mac OS, but I can't justify spending the money. Maybe when Vista drivers along with a good virtual PC capability to run Vista and Mac OS concurrently are available. I also found numerous posts from Mac forums that clearly gave the edge to Adobe's Photoshop Elements over Apple's iPhoto. I decided to download the Photoshop Elements 5.0 30 day trial.
Photoshop Elements 5.0 is as intuitive to use as Microsoft Digital Image Suite 2006. For basic and intermediate photo editing reviewers have given both of these products high marks for quality, organization and simplicity. However, the Adobe Slide Show application, which correlates to the Microsoft Photo Story application, is much more powerful. You can see this right off with the ability to control each slide's time and to chain identical slide together to create very creative pan and zoom effects. You can also add Mpeg videos. At this point I am thrilled, although not happy I needed to purchase another product. I created my slide show easily, unfortunately when it came time to add a soundtrack I was dismayed at the lack of options. You can only import mp3 and wma files. What happened to aac? It hard to understand that a product team would omit aac in today's iPod world. I understand Microsoft not implementing aac but I don't understand why Adobe would not. As I dug deeper it became clear that the audio capability is pretty lame. It only allows you to create a single audio track, and even though you can add narration to slides, there is no way to control the volume of the audio track against the narration. To be fair I have not yet tried Adobe Premiere 3.0 video editing program (I could only download a trial copy of Premiere 2.0). Premiere 3.0 can be purchased with Photoelements 5.0 as bundle. The documentation refers to a link which passes content from Photoelement to Premiere for final editing and DVD creation. I found a comment on a forum pointing to using Sony's DVD editing suite Vegas 6. I have downloaded a 30 day trial. It is a very sophisticated editing suites allowing you to create multiple audio tracks which you can control individually. It imports aac tracks and I was able to create the soundtrack I wanted. I don't really want to spend the $86, however I have to say that it is a bargain and seems rock solid, although the preview was always lagging the audio. The DVD I created with it came out very well. I did have to use Nero 6 to create the DVD from a .wmv file, the trial does not allow direct DVD creation.
Using Sony's Vegas 6 was a tangent so I could complete slide show. As an amateur tool, I am very impressed by it, but I don't do enough video editing to justify the $86 expenditure. After reviewing Adobe's 30 day return policy I am ordering the Photoelement 5.0/Premiere 3.0 bundle to see how it fares...Hopefully I should receive it next week.
Go to Part 3.
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