Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Picasa Tip: Make a Movie

Picasa 3 has a very easy way to take a bunch of photos, add a song you like, and create a movie.  All you do is select the photos you want in the movie and click the Movie button at the bottom of the screen.  Once in the ‘Movie Maker’ you can add a song from your computer’s music library.  It will even time the playback of the photos to match the length of the song.  You can also choose among several choices for the transition between photos.  Pan and Zoom is the default transition.

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Show-Me-How Videos:

 

This is different from Picasa’s slideshow feature in that the end result is a single file – a .wmv movie file.  Once the movie is created, you can upload it to your Picasa Web Album, or better yet, to Youtube.  It’s a single click to create movie and upload to Youtube.  You must already have a Youtube account.  The .wmv file will playback on any computer with Windows Media Player.  If you want to play it on a TV’s DVD player, you need one more step.  In Vista there is a DVDMaker that comes with Windows.  Just open that up and add your .wmv file to it – then burn DVD.  If you’re on XP, you need some other software like MyDVD from Roxio. For Macintosh, I believe iDVD will do the trick.

The movie maker capability in Picasa is very basic.  For example, if you would like one song for the first 10 slides and another song for the remaining slides – it can’t do it – one song per movie … period.  Our favorite *free* program for making fancier slide show movies is Photo Story 3. (Tutorial video: download and install Photo Story 3).  It allows for many different songs on the sound track.  It will even create the music for you and make it end at the right place.  You can also add narration.
This tip brought to you by Geeks on Tour

Geeks on Tour is a membership website with hundreds of Tutorial Videos on topics of interest to travelers, such as managing digital photos with Picasa, Route-Planning with Streets and Trips, and sharing your travels with a website using Blogger or with friends on Facebook. You can subscribe to our free e-newsletters, or become a paid member and be able to view all of the videos in the Learning Library.

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Show-Me-How Videos about photo story:

 

 

5 comments:

  1. I recently did a small video and became amazed to learn the behind the scene unseen work of making movies. The whole editing and post production aspect of movie making motivates me the most. That’s when I started searching left and right to find out more on recording movies. I wanted to optimize my know how on the activity to expert level. Therefore I even started a blog to archive my opinions & views to share with anyone wanting to expand in this field.

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  2. I recently began using Picasa for Virtual Tours. I found that the first movie was easy to upload via the "Upload to YouTube" button, however after that first upload, Picasa stalls with a window popup "preparing to upload video" and sits indefinately. I have since had to upload directly from the YouTube site and hopefully there is a fix for this Picasa issue. There are many comments in the user forums with the same issue. Any help will be appreciated.

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  3. i had Picassa and made some great slideshows,it was a free program and i loved it..But when they cleaned up my computer i lost the program,trying to get it back.Thank you.

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  4. I have way more pictures in my movie than the song unless they are only on the screen for 1 second. I'd like to be able to add an additional song but can't see if that's even possible. I really don't want to use the song Inagodadavida! :)

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