More on Photo Story 3

Yesterday I talked about the amazing Photo Story 3 from Microsoft and what a great tool it was for quickly making videos from just one picture or from as many as you wanted. I’m sure you will agree that the results were pretty good especially considering that the software is free.

I did not embed the videos in to my post but provided links to the .wmv files that should open in Windows Media Player. Unfortunately the files on my server are not performing as expected and are downloading into the temporary folder before playing. This is probably due to the fact that a true streaming server is required.

Today I am going to embed video into posts starting with the following video.

I started with the .wmv file which was viewed through a link in the previous post and is 904kbs in size and converted it to a .avi file using the free version of STOIK Video Converter 2 which increased its size to 120MB!! I then used, also free, Riva FLV Encoder to convert the file to a Flash format file and back to a reasonable 1.3MB size.

That is a bit of a work around but is doesn’t mean spending any money which is in keeping with this method of producing cheap videos for your website. There are video conversion software programs available for converting to .flv in one step but they are not free.

It is obvious that Photo Story 3 is a useful piece of software for producing quick, good quality and cheap website videos. The program can be downloaded here.