Experience counts

   This afternoon, I experienced a case study in experience. A dear friend who was recently married wanted to make a PowerPoint slide show of forty of her wedding photos. She took six hours to make sure the music and the photos synchronized. That meant only that there were enough photos to bridge the length of the song.

She wrote today asking for a little help in making the presentation loop. That was a snap but I suggested she might consider MovieMaker. I had just finished making a forty-slide movie using that software. I had created a PowerPoint a year ago for my daughter’s friends, but to celebrate her graduation from fifth grade I thought it would be nice to make a few movies. The steps of converting the PowerPoint were very simple.

First, I saved the PowerPoint as a jpg image file. Selecting this option prompts PowerPoint to ask if you want all the slides or just the current one. Well let us just take all, shall we? PowerPoint created a file for me, which I placed on the desktop.

In MovieMaker, I set up a new project, imported the images, and imported a short piece of music by Mark Mothersbaugh from The Royal Tenenbaums. I dragged the music onto the timeline and selected “create AutoMovie.” A few minutes later, the software had placed all the slides into the same order in which I had imported them from the original PowerPoint. Each slide had some random transitions based on the way the program perceived the beat of the music.

The whole process, with a few tweaks to add a few special effects, took about ten minutes. I am looking forward to sharing MovieMaker with my friend. When she sees how easily and professional her slides can look, I think she will begin using it for some of her lecture slideshows.