Indigo-Daisy

How to make a video slide show with your own photos:

Windows Movie Maker

This actually is quite easy to do.  For the "Dear Mom" project I used "Windows Movie Maker" which is a free tool that comes standard with windows XP.  The program is actually quite powerful for being a free tool.  You just import and drop in your pictures, and music.  It comes prepackaged with many added features such as  creating transitions between slides, video effects and adding titles and credits.

Photo Story 3

For the slide show I am making for my parents anniversary, I used both ‘Windows Movie Maker" and "Photo Story 3" for Windows which is also a free download.  "Photo Story 3" has some great panning options that Movie Maker does not have, so what I have been doing is creating a video clip in Photo Story 3 and then importing that clip into Movie Maker .  It works like a charm.

GoldWave

For the audio portion, I like to choreograph the music to the show.  My son told me about this great program called GoldWave for editing music.  I tried it and it works great.  It will clip the music off to where I need it to fit in with my story, and I can use the volume features to make the music fade out at that point.  A free evaluation version is available to download and experiment with. If you find you like it, the purchase price is only about $45.00.

I didn’t use GoldWave for the "Dear Mom" video,  however,  I did use it quite a bit in the Anniversary Video that I have been working on for my parents.

Publish

Once your slide show is complete, you just save it to your computer and it is really easy to upload to your blog or to a service like YouTube to share with others.  You can also save it to a CD.

So if you have some time and a bunch of old photos, this is a really fun project and it also makes a great gift that can be passed down from generation to generation.