Before I get to the subject, I want to remind all of you that winter registration for the South Bay Adult School and mail-in/fax registration for Torrance has started with walk-in due to start December 7th.

Additionally, I will be teaching another new class for PVNET that differs substantially from any course I teach at SBAS or Torrance. Click on the appropriate tab above to find out more.

 Those of you who have taken my Photo Projects class know that two of the programs we work with are Movie Maker and Photo Story 3. With the introduction of Windows 7, things are changing for these two programs. In the following I summarize a few of the points discussed in an article by PapaJohn,the well known exert/author regarding all things Movie Maker.

http://www.brighthub.com/multimedia/video/articles/25282.aspx

Starting with Photo Story 3, it appears that Vista is the end of the road for this program. It can not be installed on Windows 7. There is a way to get it to run in Windows 7, but it is not straightforward at all. I have it running on Win 7, but only because I did not do a complete reinstall when I upgraded to Win 7 from Vista.

For those of you who like/use Movie Maker, the situation is much better, but somewhat complicated.

It is clear that Live Movie Maker is the future. It’s part of the “Live” series of programs that Microsoft has introduced over the past couple of years. However as of right now, it does not have nearly all of the features that Movie Maker 2.1 (the flagship version) has yet. It can be downloaded for free.

Movie Maker 2.6, which can be downloaded for free runs on Win 7. However, it’s my understanding based on the referenced article, that it does not support acquiring video directly from a video camera, like Movie Maker 2.1 It does run on both Vista and Win 7.

Movie Maker 6 is the version that is part of the Vista operating system. It can be copied over to Win 7 and after some relatively complicated adjustments, I believe PapaJohn got it running on Win 7.

PapaJohn also got Movie Maker 2.1 to run on Windows 7, using some advanced computer magic. This is important, because it is this version that supports hundreds user written free profiles and effects. Eventually, similar user-written effects etc will be written for Win 7 compatible versions, but for now if someone is using these add-ins, the ability to continue using MM 2.1 in Win 7 is very important. I had loaded a few of these in MM 2.1 when I still had Win XP. I believe some are also working in Vista’s MM 6.

For most people, it seems the best path to follow is to download the free MM 2.6 for use in Win 7, or use Live Movie Maker, which is bound to have features added as time goes on.

One of the more interesting new features in the PSE 8 Editor is the Recompose Tool. Basically this new tool allows you to crop from the center of an image. Or in other words, remove the space or objects between two people/objects of your photo. Here is a short demonstration on how to use this new feature. For best results, right click on the link below and select Save as….

Download the MOV file to your desktop or some other folder and play it from there.

PSE 8 Recompose Tool Tutorial

While you are here, take a look at the new class I’ll be teaching this month for PVNET.

Here are a few more video tutorials I made using Photo Shop Elements 6. I made them as backups for one of my lecture cruises just in case I had laptop computer problems and was unable to do the live demonstration. Fortunately, I did not need to use them. They are not very polished, but I think they are clear enough to be helpful. Even though the videos are using PSE 6, they very similar to what you see/do using PSE 7 or now PSE 8.

They do require Active X control (whatever that means), so you will will need to click on the little thin message that appears at the top of your browser after you click on the link to continue. Also, to best view the video press the F11 key, so it displays full screen.

Also, you may find it better to right click on the link and select Save Target as…. Then download the file to your desktop and play the tutorial from there.

1. General Introduction
2. Quick Fix Window
3. Guided Edit – Shadows and Highlights (a different picture than used in the video tutorial posted earlier)
4. Levels Command
5. Panorama – Part 1
6. Panorama – Part 2

I have a couple of more that I will include in a future post if it appears they are useful to anyone. So please comment, ya or nay. Also, let me know if you have trouble viewing them. I may be able to help you.

I apologize for the confusing formating of yesterday’s post. I tried to send the formatting I laid out in Word to my blog, but somewhere along the way the step numbering got messed up. I’ve since cleaned it up a bit.

Also, I’ll have more to say about this in the next installment, but for now, make sure you do the following. When you begin to make your slide show in the Organizer’s Slide Show Editor, set the flag to crop landscape pictures in the Slide Show Preferences dialog box.

Until next time,

Don

Photoshop Elements has an easy to use Slide Show Editor that is really quite powerful. One of its features is the ability to apply pans and zooms to your still images, commonly called the Ken Burns Effect. Many other slide show programs also include this feature, for example Photo Story 3 by Microsoft. However, I find PSE’s very easy to use, so it is my personal choice for making slide shows.

One of the prime ways I use to share the pictures I take is to make a slide show, and then burn it to a DVD for viewing on a widescreen high definition television. PSE cannot actually burn the DVD, but it can produce a video file that can then be imported to a typical video editing program for the burning of the DVD. If you also have Premiere Elements, there is even a more direct way to produce the DVD that is compatible with players attached to your TV.

However, what has been somewhat frustrating, is PSE, even PSE 7, does not directly support producing borderless wide screen or 16:9 aspect ratio .wmv files. It does support producing DVD quality .wmv for standard 4:3 aspect ratio DVDs. Questions on how to do this with PSE frequently come up on user forums. The following link is to a recent discussion on this topic.

http://www.adobeforums.com/webx?128@@.59b73505

After participating in some of these discussions and trying various experiments with PSE 7, I have come up with a series of steps that at least work for me for making a .wmv file in the Slide Show Editor of PSE which can then be imported to a video editing program for burning the DVD which will be borderless when viewed on a high definition widescreen TV.  True there is certain level of loss quality that results from making the intermediate .wmv file, but frankly I can’t see it, the final results look great on my wide screen TV.

Ok, with that as a background here is what I did.

• Resize/Crop the slide show images to a 16:9 aspect ratio. I used 1920×1080 pixels.

This not only gets the images to the right aspect ratio, but it tremendously reduces the image file size which will make rendering the slide show movie a lot easier and quicker. You do not need anything near your camera’s image resolution to produce a high quality DVD.

• Put a checkmark in the Landscape option in the Slide Show Preferences dialog.

When you start a new slide show the Slide Show Preferences dialog pops up. See the figure below. As it turned out, this was the key to producing a borderless DVD.

•  After you have designed your slide show, and are ready to share/produce or output it, select Output > Send to TV > Widescreen High Definition (720p) to produce the .wmv file.

This is not the recommended output format for producing DVDs as described in the slide show editor.

• Open Premiere Elements (PRE) or another DVD burning program such as those from Nero or Roxio etc, and import the .wmv video file from the above step.
•  In PRE Burn the DVD using the WS 720p preset. Similar profiles are presumably in other DVD burning programs.

 The advantage of the above approach is all of the transitions, pan/zoom effects etc that were easily generated in the PSE  Slide Show Editor are maintained.

 I still have some details to work out regarding things like how to handle portrait images, what if the images are not cropped to a 16:9 aspect ratio, and how best to handle extreme zooms.  But at least the above process results in a very good quality DVD that plays on my widescreen TV without the borders.

Until next time.