I just came from the local farmers market with a dozen bananas, six watermelons and two dozen pictures. I bought less fruits and snapped more pictures. It made me realize how many pictures I have been taking lately. The next obvious thought follows is what am I going to do with all these pictures? I cannot print them all, simply because I do not have space to keep the printed photos. I already have more than 50 CDs and DVDs filled by various pictures. But viewing them on computer is time consuming as I have to open the pictures manually by double-clicking on each of these image files. I was thinking along these lines when my good friend Trisha suggested the PhotoFilmStrip software to make a movie out of all these pictures. Watching a movie is easier than viewing all the image files – you can fast forward, go back, play it slow, pause etc. And the best thing is that you do not need a computer to watch the pictures movie, just use your ordinary DVD player and you can watch it on your large screen TV.
The PhotoFilmStrip is a freeware software that allows you to turn your pictures into a movie. Using this software you can make a movie using your existing picture files. The movie generated this way can be of AVI , MP4 or FLV type and can be directly put on a CD or DVD disk. You can also add a background music to the video using any of the MP3 or WAV audio files that you have. Actually it comes with two audio tracks that you can use.
You can get PhotoFilmStrip either from the sourceForge website or from the PhotoFilmStrip site. The download is available both as an installer as well as a portable application. After running the downloaded application, the first thing you have to do is create a new project by clicking on the New Project icon or pressing Ctrl+N.
This would open the new project window where you can specify the project title, its location on your hard disk, the aspect ratio (16:9, 4:3 or 3:2) and the length. The length of the video generated can be set to be the total length of the audio file that you select for the background music, or you can choose a hard-coded value like 10 minutes.
Now you can start dragging-n-dropping your pictures on the PhotoFilmStrip window. It can select most popular image formats. You can change the order of appearance of the pictures, rotate them, add effects like sepia or grayscale and add subtitles. If a picture does not fit in the chosen aspect ratio, then you can choose the motion to display the entire picture. When you are ready, hit F9 on your keyboard and it will start creating the movie.
The progress will be shown in the Job Queue window. After the movie has been produced, you can click on the down-arrow icon in the Job Queue window and select to play the video or the open the folder containing that video file.
Conclusion: PhotoFilmStrip is a very easy to use software that can convert your pictures into an AVI, FLV or MP4 movie. It is ideal for turning your valued picture moments into a movie file that you can watch over any DVD player. It is also great for making instructional Youtube videos.
You can download PhotoFilmStrip from http://www.photofilmstrip.org/.