3 Ways to Create Video Slideshows in Windows

Did you know that you can create DVD photo slideshows in Windows Vista and Windows 7 with preloaded software? I found out about this the other day and it’s great! It’s called Windows DVD Maker and is a free tool in Windows Vista and 7, just like Windows Media Player. Using the software, you can create professional quality DVDs in a very short time.

DVD Maker comes with over 20 different DVD styles that let you create professional looking DVDs to match the theme of your home movie or photo slideshow. You can also customize your DVD even further by adding a disc title, notes page, and editing menu text.

Windows DVD Maker

When it comes to creating slideshows, there are not many options for effects, transitions, etc. in Windows DVD Maker, as it is only intended to burn previously created projects. I’ll first write how to use it to create a super-simple photo slideshow that you can burn to DVD using Windows DVD Maker, but at the end I’ll also mention other programs you can use to create more beautiful slideshows. from photos before recording them. on DVD.

Using Windows DVD Maker, you can customize your DVD menus using their built-in and very professional styles. So, if you have some photos and Windows Vista or 7, let’s create some slideshows on DVD that you can share and watch on your TV.

First go to Start and then to All Programs. Click Windows DVD Maker or just type it in the search box.

Find the folder with pictures, select all the photos you want and click “Add”. You should see the slideshow folder listed with the number of images. If you have more images from another folder, you can also add them and they will be added to the slideshow folder. Here’s what it looks like with a couple of photos.

Go ahead and click Next and you can now choose a DVD menu style. Here you can customize the menu text, customize the menu itself, and view the DVD menu.

As I mentioned earlier, there are not many options for customizing your slideshow, but you can do a few small things by clicking the slideshow button at the top (next to the Settings menu).

Here you can add music to the slideshow, change the length of the slideshow in according to the length of the music, change the display duration of each image, change the transition type used for each image, and choose whether to pan and scale the images. This is a basic option, but will help a lot of people.

When you finish adjusting the parameters, click the “Save” button! That’s all! The DVD will be burned and you will now have your own DVD slideshow.

Windows DVD Maker will encode the movie into the appropriate DVD format and then burn it. The encoding process takes much longer than the recording process, so you may have to wait a bit depending on the speed of your computer.

So what if you are using Windows 8 / 8.1 and don’t have access to Windows DVD Maker? Well, there are a couple more options. One of my favorites is the free DVD Slideshow GUI

DVD slideshow GUI

DVD Slideshow GUI mainly takes advantage of the set of free tools that are already available and integrates them into a beautiful GUI. Once installed and launched, click on Slideshow and then Add Images and Videos.

You should see a list of all the added images with some information such as Duration (slide), Animation, Transition, and Duration (transition). The duration is in frames, and the default transitions are randomly selected when images are loaded.

Of course, you can change all of these settings simply by right-clicking on any image. The slide settings dialog box opens.

Here you can change the transition and duration, and you can also click on the little brush icon that will ask you to choose your favorite photo editor. You can select anything from Photoshop as long as it’s installed in Microsoft Paint. This way you can edit the photos in advance or with DVD Slideshow if you like. The subtitle option will add whatever text you enter to the image, and then you can change the position and style of that text using the style dropdown.

You can also animate images by clicking, selecting one, clicking Slideshow, and then clicking Animation. You can scale, pan and rotate images with this tool.

You can also preview the entire slideshow by simply double-clicking any photo in the slideshow. When the slideshow is finished, click File and then Project Settings.

Here you can choose the resolution and format for the slideshow, the aspect ratio, whether to include effects before or after processing, and also adjust the quality of the animation. Finally, you can click “File” and then select “Burn to Disc” to burn your slideshow to CD or DVD. The program also has the ability to export it as a movie file or upload to YouTube.

Microsoft Photo Story 3

Photo Story 3 is almost 10 years old, but it’s still great software that works on everything from Windows XP to Windows 8.1. After installing it, select “Start a new story” in the wizard.

On the next screen, click Import Images and select all the images you want to include in your slideshow. Once loaded, you will be able to click the image in the grid at the bottom and then click the little buttons to fix color levels, remove red-eye, rotate or edit.

When you click Edit, you can rotate and crop the photo, automatically fix it, or add effects. You can also apply one effect to all images if you like.

Then you can add titles to each photo and adjust the alignment and font using the buttons directly above the text box. You can also select an effect for each image on this screen.

What’s great about Photo Story is that you can also add narration to each photo by recording your voice right in the program! This is quite an interesting and unique feature, which is why I still recommend this program 10 years after its release.

If you click the Adjust Motion button, you can add any zoom / pan and transition effects here. I also like the ability to select exactly the parts of the image that I want to enlarge, rather than a program that randomly selects.

Now you can add music to your slideshow by selecting MP3 files or even have the crazy option of creating your own music on the fly combining different preset music tunes, changing the tempo, etc.

Finally, you choose what you want to do with your photo story. You can either save it to your computer, which you can choose if you want to burn it to DVD later. Basically, it saves the file as a WMV file, which you then simply add to Windows DVD Maker to burn to DVD.

You can also click Settings to adjust the resolution and quality of the saved video. So, you have three options for creating photo slideshows and burning them to DVD, emailing them, uploading to YouTube, or simply saving them to your computer. Enjoy!

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