Photo Story 3

P

PapaJohn \(MVP\)

With today's release of Photo Story 3, I asked Microsoft which newsgroup
would be the most appropriate one to post comments/questions about it, as
it's not bundled with the new dual Plus pack, and you don't need the pack to
get it.

The answer was this one.

I'll be leaving my Photo Story 2 website as is... and building a new major
branch of my Movie Maker website to cover Photo Story 3, as I tend to use
these two apps together. I just kicked it off with a new page for Photo
Story 3.
--
PapaJohn

Movie Maker 2 - www.papajohn.org
Photo Story 2 - www.photostory.papajohn.org

..
 
Y

Yves Alarie

Thanks for letting us know. You have great info and I always refer these
questions to your site.
 
B

Barry L. Wallis

David said:
Be aware that you can't play it on a mac as no codecs are available.
Click to expand...

I am not a Mac person so please forgive my ignorance. Can Macs play
VCDs? Also, couldn't you use MovieMaker2 to re-encode it to something a
Mac can play?
 
P

PapaJohn \(MVP\)

Every time I'm in Chicago, I stop at the big Apple store and play my videos
on Macs.... the free downloadable viewer for it works fine. But maybe it's
just for movies from MM2. I'll have to check PhotoStories more closely the
next time.
--
PapaJohn

Movie Maker 2 - www.papajohn.org
Photo Story 2 - www.photostory.papajohn.org

..
Be aware that you can't play it on a mac as no codecs are available.
 
D

David Candy

Just did some experimenting. Movie maker wants to resize it and change the quality. Making it the same file size size as PS3 the quality is crap. It's hardly a user friendly process either. Taking MM's defaults increased the size 5 times.
 
P

PapaJohn \(MVP\)

My rule of thumb is that a movie file from MM2 is 10 times bigger than one
from PhotoStory.

There's lots of choices for quality in MM2, and you can add more using a
custom profile....
--
PapaJohn

Movie Maker 2 - www.papajohn.org
Photo Story 2 - www.photostory.papajohn.org
Photo Story 3 - menu branch at www.papajohn.org

..
Just did some experimenting. Movie maker wants to resize it and change the
quality. Making it the same file size size as PS3 the quality is crap. It's
hardly a user friendly process either. Taking MM's defaults increased the
size 5 times.
 
R

Rehan

David Candy said:
Just did some experimenting. Movie maker wants to resize it and
change the quality. Making it the same file size size as PS3 the
quality is crap. It's hardly a user friendly process either.
Taking MM's defaults increased the size 5 times.
Click to expand...

This is as expected. You need to understand the diffrences between a normal
movie and the movie produced by photostory which is not really a movie but a
collection of your still images and instructins about how to render them on
the client...

The output produced by Movie maker is encoded using one of the movie codec.
A movie codec is designed to expect a scene change almost every frame so it
may have to store each frame as a seperate image. So for one second of a
movie, one can get 30 different frames (ntsc). This is huge amount of data.
Some codecs would detect that same frame areas are repeated among several
consecutive frames, so they can be clever and only store the differences to
conserve space. This is all well and good and works with still or
panned/zoomed photos as well.

However the Image codec used by Photostory is even more clever as it stores
only *one image* for the entire duration of zoom or pan and at runtime keeps
rendering the different areas of the same image over and over again. The
image stored is slightly bigger to allow pan or zoom over the full range.
This way it acheives a hell of a lot more space saving than any movie codec
can ever acheive.

For more information see MSDN
<http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/d.../htm/usingthewindowsmediavideo9imagecodec.asp>
 
Y

Yves Alarie

I fully agree. A nice way of getting down to what Photo Story does. A very
nice way of displaying (or storing or e-mailing) some pictures and have fun
doing it. No more and no less.Nice to have and use but not to make a big
production.
 
G

Guest

Hi PapaJohn,
I am a big digital photo lover, and tired out Photo Story 3, and LOVE IT!
I am frustrated, however, because I do not know how to burn to a DVD for
gifts for my family. My husband serves in the Army, and we are always apart
- I would love to be able to send him DVD's so he can watch the slideshows of
the kids.
I have Nero, and Ulead DVD PictureShow 2. Would those work?
PLEASE help! I have exhausted all seraching, and can't find any help on how
to do this! :)
THANK YOU!!
Theresa J.
 
P

PapaJohn \(MVP\)

Hi Theresa,

DVD authoring and burning are not part of either Photo Story or Movie Maker.

I'm just starting the final page for my PS3 website, about saving and
distributing. I see choices for saving to files that are appropriate for
DVDs (NTSC and PAL). They would be WMV files, which many of the DVD software
packages can't use as inputs.

If your DVD software can't use the WMV, import it into Movie Maker 2 and
save it as a DV-AVI file.... that would be a type I DV-AVI which some DVD
software can't handle also.... in that case do the conversion using Movie
Maker 1, which would make a type II DV-AVI file, which all DVD software
should be able to handle. Your Nero and ULead should work.

--
PapaJohn

Movie Maker 2 - www.papajohn.org
Photo Story 2 - www.photostory.papajohn.org
Photo Story 3 - use the menu branch at www.papajohn.org

..
 
G

Guest

Thanks so much, PapaJohn. I will look into it, and try it out. I will let
you know how it works out for me! I appreciate your help.
Theresa J.
 
R

Raymond Dalgleish

PapaJohn said:
Hi Theresa,

DVD authoring and burning are not part of either Photo Story or Movie Maker.

I'm just starting the final page for my PS3 website, about saving and
distributing. I see choices for saving to files that are appropriate for
DVDs (NTSC and PAL). They would be WMV files, which many of the DVD software
packages can't use as inputs.

If your DVD software can't use the WMV, import it into Movie Maker 2 and
save it as a DV-AVI file.... that would be a type I DV-AVI which some DVD
software can't handle also.... in that case do the conversion using Movie
Maker 1, which would make a type II DV-AVI file, which all DVD software
should be able to handle. Your Nero and ULead should work.
Click to expand...

My initial experience of producing DVD format WMV files from Photo Story
3 was a big disappointment. They looked blurred compared with files that
had been produced for presentation on a computer screen.

After much investigation, I discovered that it is possible to edit the
profiles that control the output parameters from Photo Story 3. The
profile for making PAL DVD files seemed to have the keyframe value set
far too high. I reduced it to a value of 1 and there was an immediate
improvement in the quality of the WMV files that were produced. I have
not looked to see if the NTSC DVD profile has the same problem.

The profiles are stored in a folder within the Photo Story 3 folder in
"Program Files". They have a strange naming scheme that does not give
any hint about which profile is which. The easiest way to work things
out is to double click on a profile which loads it into the profile
editor. You can then read the profile description that is embedded with
the profile file.

I use TMPGEnc to convert the WMV files to mpeg2.

There are free utilities available that convert between AVI types I and
II - no need to use Movie Maker 1:

http://www.jhepple.com/dv1to2.htm
http://www.ulead.com/download/dvconverter/download.htm
http://www.canopus.com/US/products/DV_file_converter/pm_dv_file_converter.asp

Hope this helps,

Raymond
 

Ask a Question

Want to reply to this thread or ask your own question?

You'll need to choose a username for the site, which only take a couple of moments. After that, you can post your question and our members will help you out.

Ask a Question

Similar Threads

Website for Photo Story 3 12
Another Page on the Photo Story 3 Site 5
DVD Plug-In for Photo Story 3 1
Templates for Photo Story 3 4
Happy Holidays 1
Poll: How Long are Your Photo Stories 2
Photo Story 3..... custom size stories 2
add part of a wmv arquive in a photo story 3 album 13

Top