Adding Effects and Transitions to Your Photo Movie

It’s important to remember that these images do not have be whimsical. The images could just as easily be graphics with an audio layer explaining a complex technical problem, which would be perfect for website presentations or other work-related idea exchanges.

For our photo video, we want to add effects between each photo to spice up the video. To do this we return to the main project window, right click the first photo in the timeline view, and then select Effects.

There are a multitude of effects you can add to a photo. You can do everything from spin the image 360 degrees, to making the photo film grain quality. You can add more than one effect to each photo in the timeline. Select each effect and choose Add. You can also remove effects. Once you have the effects you want to add, click the Ok button, and preview the video to see your effect in action.

Effects can make for a more effective presentation of your photos or your professional images. To add to the appeal of your video, you may also want to transition between photos

The most common transition would be to fade out on the last photo, but you may want to fade in and out between every photo in the timeline. You can change the view back to Storyboard view to make this quicker.

Once in Storyboard view, you will notice the small box with a shaded arrow between each photo. If you click the Transitions task on the left sidebar, the available transitions are shown. You can drag the transition you want onto the shaded area. This makes adding transitions quick and easy.

Once you’ve added a title, credit information, effects, and transitions, you can review your work right in the Movie Maker dashboard.(You can add credit information by selecting “Titles and Credit” in the task list on the left sidebar). If you like what you’ve created, the next step would be to save the video. Every movie you create should be saved as Movie Maker Project files so you can easily edit it later. To transform the movie into a format suitable for sites like YouTube, you need to select Publish movie under the File menu.

1. Select File > Publish Movie.
2. The dialog asks where you want to publish the movie You can burn it straight to DVD or CD from here, or email it to someone (but watch the size!). The easiest thing to do; however, is to publish to This computer so that you have a master copy on your hard drive and from there you can burn it to disk, email it or upload it to a website.
   Click Next.
   
   
   
3. Type the filename for the video and select the location to save the file on your hard drive. Click Next when completed.
   
   

   

4. The next questions relate to the compression of the video. Select a quality that suits your needs from the More Settings dropdown menu, or simply use the default setting. The lower the Mbps equates to a quicker load time on the web. Some sites have a file size limit (YouTube’s is 100MB), so you may need to select a lower Mbps to make the video small enough to upload. I chose VHS quality for this particular project. If you lower the Mbps and then find that the quality is too low, you can always come back to the project and republish with different settings.
   
   

   

5. Click Publish when the file size meets your needs. Movie Maker may take a few minutes to save your video.

Now you can access the video you just created and play it, share it with others, or revisit the project to make adjustments. The quality can always be changed later, so long as you saved the project.