Slide Shows and Bags

Here are a couple of items that are completely off-topic but hopefully a few of you might find them interesting.

The first item is some software I discovered this past summer for creating slide shows.  I wasn’t happy with the software that I had for creating slide shows of vacation pictures.  I searched for a commercial product but still didn’t find what I was looking for at a reasonable price.  Finally I found an article that mentioned Microsoft’s Photo Story.  It seemed to have what I was looking for and the price couldn’t be beat since it’s a free download.  Click the picture below to see a small sample I put together using pictures from a backpacking trip this summer in Olympic National Park.  (I was trying to keep the final size small for download and chose a video quality that isn’t that great but you can get an idea of what the software does.)

The output from PhotoStory is a wmv file so you can use it as input to Windows Movie Maker or any other video editing software and combine your photos with other video into a larger video.

There are a few features I wish Photo Story had but for the price I can live with it’s limitations.  Here’s a link to the Microsoft site that describes Photo Story 3 and points you to the download.  By the way I highly recommend visiting the park some day too.

The other item I want to tell you about is that Autodesk is selling left-over bags from AU.  Every bag is unique because the center panel is made from left over vinyl banners from previous events.  Out of all of the bags from previous AU’s, this is my personal favorite for usability.