"If I had a Talking Picture"

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When I first started blogging - I only did ‘text‘.

I didn’t own a digital camera you see,

but after a while I did manage to use my printer/scanner

and upload my first images.

What a difference -

‘A picture paints a thousand words’ they say, and so it did.

Having failed English Language (O level) at school three times,

this introduction of pictures came to my rescue,

and I didn’t have to write as much.

Well, it was about two years ago that I thought about trying video clips.

I thought you needed a video camera

and fancy editing software to get started.

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It must have been last year,

I discovered my digital camera took ‘moving pictures’,

provided you had enough memory in the camera.

Thirty frames a second soon gobbles up a few Mbytes.

‘Discovered’ is perhaps not quite the right word,

as I knew about it when I bought the camera,

it was that I just never tried it out and additionally,

to make it more difficult,

all the instructions were provided on a CD rather than a ‘real’ document.

So I did try a short clip of still pictures first, -

at a Steam rally - and used blogger to upload it.

tracker-bar.blogspot.com/2010/10/medley-of-summer-days-out.html

Since then I have done short movies of the cats but no headers or music.

monkey-organ.blogspot.com/2010/10/two-overnight-movie-stars.html

monkey-organ.blogspot.com/2011/02/yesterdays-birthday-boy.html

So I dabbled with the Vista version of ‘Windows Movie Maker’.

This is how I produced the slideshows for the last two posts.

(There are now four up on YouTube, by the way.)

I’m sure you can tell that I’m no expert,

but you have to start somewhere and the best way is to ’suck it and see’. You will make mistakes and you will learn from it.

I didn’t sit down with the User Guide open alongside,

it was more a case of “I wonder what this does?“

and then finding out!

Helen asked me for a Movie Maker tutorial, no doubt she is planning to entertain us with a slideshow of her English holiday perhaps. I gather she took hundreds of photographs whilst over here this May.

So I will describe what I did.

I am not an expert and I’m sure there are better ways of doing things - and I’m sure there are probably help videos up on YouTube although I haven’t checked.

I am doing a write up over on the my other blog for any interested.

here:-

tracker-bar.blogspot.com/2011/07/using-vista-movie-maker.html

This means I can carry on here with my usual ramblings later.

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