Let's create a movie II

Last January after creating a movie using Windows Vista I documented it in a blog entry. This weekend before going to my wife's parents for an early Thanksgiving get together, I again created a movie but this time using my Apple MacBook. I already had digital photos that my kids took during their Princess Cruise to Scandinavia on my Mac laptop. When they got home from teh cruise, I hooked up our Canon Powershot A590 to my son's iMac and transferred all 560+ photos. I then sat down at the computer with my wife and came up with 75 of the photos she thought represented the whole trip. I burnt a CD of these photos to send to her sister. Before sending her the CD, I put it in my MacBook and created an iPhoto library for all of the cruise photos. On Saturday morning at 10 am I decided it would be nice to create a movie of these photos so we could watch them on their TV instead of huddling around my laptop to watch them. Plus they would have the DVD and could watch it whenever they wanted or to show their friends. I have never created a movie on my laptop nor used iMovie or iDVD.

The first thing I did was drag all of the cruise photos from iPhoto into iMovie. I then noticed the project had a default name so I changed it to "Princess Scandinavian Cruise 2009". I then thought it would be nice to change the way to movie looked so I went in the "Project Properties" and found six themes available with the default being a theme of "None". I tried the "Photo Album" theme which mean the project had to be rebuilt. Then I tried the "Bulletin Board" theme and waited for the project to be rebuilt before trying it. Then I tried the "Comic Book" theme and liked how that looked. By selecting this theme it automatically created nice transitions between the photo frames which I really liked. Then I thought I need to create a nice title page. I then found that I could add a dynamic map to that page. When I added the map I saw it had a default origin of San Francisco. When I double clicked on it, I found I could add my own origin and destination. I add JKF in NYC as origin since that is where they took off from. I added Copenhagen, Denmark as the destination since that was where they landed. I had a screen shot of their route while on the ship that I got from the Princess Cruise web site which I then added as the second title page. Then I saw that iMovie had automatically created a page that started with the words "Directed by Rick Evans". Now that was really nice touch. When I played the movie I saw the title page still had the default project name before I changed it. I tried changing the theme and that did not regenerate the title page as I expected. Then I thought I would try to double click on the title page and sure enough it let me change the title directly. I looked up at the clock and only 15 minutes had passed, which was also nice. Then I thought I have enough time to get a little creative with the end of the movie. I moved the "Directed by" page to the end and added a new credits page. There were so many formats that I tried a couple different ones. Then I added a nice underwater reflection behind the credits. When I played the movie the credits went way to fast, so I extended the length of the underwater reflection and then extended the credits to match. I then played the whole movie and showed it to my daughter, who approved.

I then tried the "Export" option from the menu and found iMovie creates Internet style movies for YouTube and Internet style sites. When in the "Share" menu I saw a "DVD" menu item and clicked on it. Then I waited and saw that iMovie was automatically transferring the files to iDVD, which I was not sure that I had or not. When I looked up at the clock it was 30 minutes since I started working on the movie and when it appeared in iDVD. It had even picked a nice 3D rotating animation for the initial DVD menu with my project title showing up in the menu and random photos being displayed on the rotating cylinder. Now that was simple and easy. With almost no effort I was ready to create a DVD and all I had to do was find a physical DVD to write it to. That was so easy it was embarrassing as within 40 minutes I had a very nice DVD. When we showed up during the weekend even though it was only 5 minutes long every one was happy with it.

I must say that it was very easy to create a very good looking movie with little effort.

JAlbum Camelot

I played around with the new Beta version of JAlbum called Camelot which is all on-line. I created a photo album of the best photos from my India trip:

Best of 2009 India trip

The only thing I found a bit strange the first time I used Camelot was that I wanted to re-order the photos on the page where I added them to the photo album as well as add comments. I found out later that I could reorganize them and add comments after uploading them. I found the overall experience very nice. It will be good when I don't have to download JAlbum to my Mac to build a photo album. However, I think Camelot will not work for me as it appears I am close to running out of space. I post my albums to my public web site currently instead of using JAlbum free account. Very impressive for a beta product!

photos of kids

photos for book

book photos

road trip photos

Photos from my son's road trip across the USA.

babies vs. teenagers

I have decided that all newly married people should consider that their cute cuddly adorable babies may one day become hormonal teenagers. It was the furthest thought from our minds when our small children were amusing us with their feats of splendor.

For the last week, everyone in the family has been looking at photos we have saved through the years. It has brought many a laugh to us all. Maybe it is news of day, like our son quitting his job before he finds another or our son who has a bad habit of being loud and waking me up in the middle of the night or our youngest son who is one minute pleasantly happy and the next like an uncontrollable hornets nest. I think I like looking at baby pictures more than the current reality.

A good friend of mine told me once that we had no hope for calm obedient children as I have rebellious disturbing genes. I can recall those teenage years and glad I never have to relive them. I was definitely out of control and only a small group of faithful friends could stand me. I was only grief and trouble for my mother. My dad was not present as he left the house when I was 14. Just as well, as life was not any better when he was around. I only heard recently that dad got fired from every job he had and typically that was yearly. I always knew that following Jesus would be the cure for my nasty life, but I never even thought about the consequences of my genes! I think mixing my bad ones with my wife's at least diluted them as none of my kids are as bad as I once was - thank goodness.

Let's create a movie

For my sister's 50^th birthday present, her boyfriend paid to have 380 photo slides, our dad took of us when we were kids, converted to photo CDs at the local CostCo in Virginia. She sent them to me by UPS so I could amuse myself, since I was not able to make it to see her last weekend. I had a wonderful thought that I should load them all on my laptop and create a single DVD movie. How hard could that be? When I had my Apple PowerBook laptop, it would have been so simple. Now I have a lowly Windows Vista laptop, which changes everything. I read once that Vista had made this easier, so I was about to find out in person.



About half of the slides were taken when my dad flipped the camera sideways. Not a problem, I thought, as it must be easy to just load then and rotate them in the default Windows Photo Gallery program that comes with Vista. Turns out you just load the first photo and page them the photos using the right arrow button and when you see one that needs to be rotated, you just click on the rotate arrow, when you click to see the next photo, the rotated one is automatically saved. This is very nice and easy as it should be. Once I had all of the images correctly oriented, I had to figure out how to make a movie.

Right at the top of same Windows Photo Gallery window, is an icon with a label next to it of "Make a Movie". How convenient. When I click on this link, I see Windows Movie Maker come up with a single photo in it. It must be easy to just add all of the images. I see a menu on the right hand side that has a section labeled "Edit" and under that section I see "Imported Media", but it is grayed out and I cannot click on it. I delete the single photo and it is still grayed out. Then I notice in the toolbar at the top is what I need the same "Import Media" and this one is clickable. Then we hit the part of Vista I like and hate all at the same time. The file explorer window comes up with the default path set to "<< Users > rick > Videos >". I go to the folder on my 2^nd hard drive with all of the folders, and then multiple-select all of the JPG files and click on the Import button at the bottom. Now I see all of my photos in the middle of the window and thumbnails are automatically generated. I actually have all of my images loaded, so it must be easy to generate a movie now.



I have finally arrived at the fun part. I have used effects and transitions in many different graphical editors, like Adobe Photoshop. Under the same Edit section that I saw previously, now I see both "Effects" and "Transitions" listed. When I click on "Effects" I see a wonderful gallery that shows me all of the effects and when I select one a window on the right hand side shows me what the affect looks like in action. Very nice, but how do I use them? I see a small strip at the bottom of the window that is labeled "Storyboard". I drag a photo down on a film strip looking area and now I see my photo in the storyboard. Turns out there is a gray star in the photo thumbnail within the storyboard where you have to drag the selected effect. With transitions there are similar gallery images and those must be dragged onto the arrow icons between photo film strip thumbnails.



I must say that the overall user experience was really nice so far as I had constant feedback on what I was doing and Windows Movie Maker allowed me explore and try things out with undo that made sense. I clicked on "Titles and credits" and found even more fun things to play with as each title has animations attached to them as well. It is amazing at how easy it is to create professional looking movie affects.



So what is the problem? I have Windows Vista Basic, so it does not allow me to create a DVD. I was able to create a video CD with a WMV file, which works great, by clicking on the "Publish Movie" link in the toolbar. It brought up a dialog with "Recordable CD" listed as one of the options. I clicked on the link at the bottom, which said "How do I publish a movie?". In the help window that came up it had another link which said "To publish and burn a movie to a DVD", which is exactly what I wanted to do. When I open the link I see the bad news:

To publish and burn a movie to a DVD, you must have Windows DVD Maker, which is included in Windows Vista Ultimate and Windows Vista Home Premium.

I am sure there is a way but I am tired after trying all afternoon to find a way with freeware or shareware to do it. Too bad Microsoft wants to make me pay as I definitely don't feel like giving them any more money after today.

UCD vs. Activity Modelling

I have been reading about Activity Modelling in contrast to User Centered Design:

Donald Norman's Activity Modelling

The problem is that I am comfortable with UCD so I will have to digest on this a bit before seeing if it can help me.

blog on India

When I was looking for photos of India of the same places I went, I found one of the nicest blogs I have read. The photos are excellent and give you a great feel for the diversity of life in India:

Destination India

India photos

There are many ways to post photos on the internet, but an easy way to organize photos on your PC and then publish to your web site is to use JAlbum. This has been updated recently and is now even easier to use. Yes, I have a Mac laptop and iPhoto exists, but JAlbum works on just about any platform so I use it so I can help friends who use it. I used a very cheap disposable camera while in India and then scanned the photos on my PSC950 HP All-In-One printer/fax/scanner. Nothing high tech here at all, but even with all of this low tech cheap stuff, the photos did not turn out that bad at all:

Photos of India 2007 trip

I also used Google to search for other people's photos of the same areas I visited and created another photo album of these:

India photos found in Google

Both of these were created using JAlbum with different output skins.