When I got married (a few years ago now) I put together a photo slide show
using PowerPoint and played it back using a projector and a laptop at the
reception and it worked really well. I see that there are solutions out
there to convert a PowerPoint slideshow to a DVD but I've never tried them.
The other option you could consider is to use PhotoStory and MovieMaker
together.
Here's the link for PhotoStory -
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/plus/dme/photo.asp
In fact my wife and I recently did this for a friend's wedding. She sent us
a whole bunch of photos along with a bit of video. We scanned all the photos
of her and the groom and then organized them into different groups. We then
ran Photo Story for each group to create multiple WMV files from Photo
Story.
We then took those WMV files, imported them into MovieMaker, organized them
along with the video we had, added some background music, a few titles here
and then and ended up with a pretty good video. We got many compliments from
the folks at the wedding. MovieMaker also has a built in narration feature
so you should be covered there.
Cheers
Dean Rowe
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
"Bruin" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:8EB65696-1B70-4BFB-8413-(E-Mail Removed)...
> Thank you for both of your quick responses. Since making my post, I found
> several relevant threads concerning aspect ratios and resizing stills.
> However, I may have arrived at better solution for my particular
> situation,
> and am interested in your feedback.
>
> On a given holiday weekend or vacation, I shoot about 45 minutes of DV and
> 100-150 still shots. I am interested in combining both in manner that can
> be
> displayed on a computer, on a TV screen, burned to a single CD or DVD, and
> supports narration. I've been playing around with PowerPoint for the last
> hour, and other than some jerkiness in one of the huge video files I
> imported
> to test the idea, it seems to work OK. Thoughts?
>
> Chris
>
> "print_maker" wrote:
>
>> Translation:
>>
>> Video is lower resolution than digital pictures. The preview is even
>> lower
>> resolution than the finished video from MM2.
>>
>>
>> Two things you can do:
>>
>> 1.) prep your images ahead of time for the size video you want to
>> output -
>> crop/resize them in Photoshop or some other picture app to 640x480 or
>> whatever your output size so you can see how they look and possibly try
>> different crops to make the subject larger in the frame giving it more
>> detail.
>>
>> 2. See the PapaJohn.org website if you plan to use the video for PC
>> playback
>> only or to project it from a PC - he has some tips on higher resolution
>> profiles for people who are not making regular video destined for a TV.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> "Dean Rowe [MS]" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
>> news:(E-Mail Removed)...
>> > The photos apprear blurry in MovieMaker because when we preview the
>> > timeline we do it at a resolution of 320x240 for various performance
>> > reasons. This resolution is probably much lower than the original
>> > resolution of your original image. When you publish your movie at a
>> > higher
>> > quality setting for example we will use the full resolution of 720x480
>> > for NTSC (or 720x576 for PAL) so your end movie should look much better
>> > than the preview.
>> > Regards
>> > Dean Rowe
>> > This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no
>> > rights.
>> >
>> > "Bruin" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
>> > news:79A9D6DE-BE38-4001-B789-(E-Mail Removed)...
>> >>I would like to images approximately 1.1 Mb in size in the movie I am
>> >>putting
>> >> together with MM. I noted that the images, which originally were very
>> >> sharp,
>> >> are hopelessly out of focus when imported into MM. What is the
>> >> solution?
>> >>
>> >> Thanks,
>> >>
>> >> Chris
>> >
>> >
>>
>>
>>