How to easily turn my pictures into a movie?
May 5, 2006 3:36 AM   Subscribe

I've taken a few hundred continuous photos with a digital camera. Having uploaded them to my computer, is there any simple way I can make them into a movie, where i can set the rate they move across the screen, and perhaps set them to music.

There are restrictions, however: I run windows, and am looking to avoid shelling out for an expensive piece of software I won't use much. If there's some free/inexpensive (and preferably relatively simple) way to do this, I'd appreciate any help finding it.
posted by jrengreen to Computers & Internet (13 answers total)
 
Try PhotoStory.
posted by arco at 4:02 AM on May 5, 2006


Do you want audio with the movie/slideshow? Do you want it in a format that DVD players can read or is cd-rom OK. For a plain slideshow with mp3 background music that can be played on computers, Picasa is an option.
posted by TedW at 4:05 AM on May 5, 2006


Windows Movie Maker, included in Windows XP, is actually pretty decent for the kind of thing you want to do. I recently did it myself with some family pictures.
posted by bering at 4:13 AM on May 5, 2006


You can do this with Flash, easy. When you create a new movie, you import the images into it. It will automatically detect if the images are part of a series (based on the filename/numbering) and ask if you want to import the entire series. Putting music to it is pretty trivial, too.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 4:27 AM on May 5, 2006


I second using flash - theres a free trial on macromedia.com.
posted by FidelDonson at 5:30 AM on May 5, 2006


Check all of these threads
posted by Happy Dave at 5:31 AM on May 5, 2006


I used a program called "Showbiz" from Arcsoft. My purpose was making time-lapsed movies. Worked well. The software came bundled on my computer.
posted by Goofyy at 6:23 AM on May 5, 2006


If your CD/DVD burner came with any Roxio software (Easy CD Media Creator, maybe), you might have a copy of a program called Motion Pictures that'll do this.

I've actually used the Mac version a few times because I found it far faster than iMovie for this particular task. Not quite as pretty or feature-rich, but handy and quick.
posted by bcwinters at 6:43 AM on May 5, 2006


If you're using a Mac you can do stuff like this with iPhoto and/or iMovie quite easily.
posted by alms at 6:52 AM on May 5, 2006


VirtualDub is a common swiss army knife when it comes to making and manipulating .avi's. I've had great results with it using XviD/ffdshow's codecs. Select the frames in explorer, drag and drop to the window, then tell it whatever codec you want to compress it using, any image filters/transforms you want to apply, and any audio you want it to mux in.
posted by Freaky at 8:04 AM on May 5, 2006


I was able to do this using the Windows Movie Maker; took a series of still images using a camera on a microscope, and ended up with a (slow frame-rate) video of whatever was under the lens.

You can set the time lapse for each individual still image you add, and drop music or some simple effects in the timeline. Only caveat is that WMM seems to crash or hang with no warning every once in a while - save your project often.

Looks like PhotoShow is designed especially for this - might be worth a try.
posted by caution live frogs at 8:42 AM on May 5, 2006


Thirding flash. We did this with stop motion animation in a sculpture class; find someone with a copy or use the free trial. Move the pics into a folder and name them sequentially (01, 02,03, etc) and then I think there's some magical import function that basically does this for you. My flash illiterate art teacher did this for like 30 movies and had no problems.
posted by MadamM at 10:38 PM on May 5, 2006


Response by poster: Thank you very much, all of you. This is tremendously helpful. And cd rom is good, TedJ - i don't even have a dvd-writer. I live in the Lower Paleolithic Era.
posted by jrengreen at 2:42 PM on May 6, 2006


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