Creating Your Movie
The final step is to create your movie. You do this in the Save Your Story movie (see Figure 17).
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Figure
17 Default templates in Photo Story control how you create your
movie.
You can choose from several default settings when you get the final screen. The first is to save your video to your computer. The second is to send your Photo Story through e-mail. Microsoft has included support for saving your stories to Pocket PC, SmartPhone, and Portable Media Center.
In Figure 17, I have selected the second option of e-mail. This creates a video 160 pixels by 120 pixels in size. This translates to 1MB for each three-minute section of video.
After the video has been created, you are taken to a screen that enables you to e-mail your video (see Figure 18).
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Figure
18 The final screen for Photo Story.
You can choose other ways of saving your story. Click the Back button and go to the Save Your Story screen. Choose Save Your story for Playback on Your Computer.
The first thing you should do is name your file (see Figure 19?).
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Figure
19 Naming your file is important—you need to find it later.
You can save your stories to your hard drive in a lot of ways. Click the Settings button to see all the different settings you can choose. One thing to remember when you are choosing settings for your video is that the wider or higher the final video is, the larger the video file size will be.
The most commonly used settings are provided in the drop-down list. There are other settings which include DVD and video CDs (see Figure 20). You can also choose other e-mail settings and settings for new video playback devices, such as Portable Media Center devices and SmartPhones.
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Figure
20 Choosing from the many different profiles for Photo Story.
The final step you need to take after you have created all your desired videos is to save your project. Click Save Project. You then can save your file as a Windows Photo Story 3 file. At any time, you can open the file in Photo Story 3 to tweak and edit the movie.
The great thing about Photo Story is that you can use collections of digital images to rapidly create a slide show. If you want to add video or more effects, however, you will need to check out Movie Maker 2, the grown-up version of Photo Story. With that said, Photo Story really fills a niche area, and you will use it more often than you might have originally thought.