This weekend I downloaded the free Microsoft Photo Story 3 and gave it a spin.
Fire it up and you get a wizard-based guide through creating a video from your pictures. Once you become familiar with the wizard, you could quite literally have an acceptable video composed in under a minute. Of course, I decided to play with it for a couple of hours - it was great fun!
First, the wizard will help you import your pictures and you can order them appropriately. It even includes features to auto-correct red eye and color/contrast imbalances. You can add text captions to photos and define effects such as transitions, panning and zooming. The visual effects are very easy to compose and quite nice in execution. The team has mentioned they have patented technology which helps automatically determine the “most interesting“ part of each photo. The zooming effects that are created by default for each picture are generally quite good, though you can of course customize them as you wish.
You may play any music you wish along with the pictures by pointing to MP3s. Photo Story also includes a very nice music generation system where you specify the type/genre of music, then choose the mood, instruments, “intensity” and tempo. You can easily assign music start/stop points at certain pictures (and PhotoStory will automatically add introductions and closing flourishes to the music at the boundaries.) You then also annotate the video by recording from your PC's microphone (and optionally adjust the volume so the music is softer while you speak.)
When you're done, it helps you generate the appropriate type of output for your needs (e.g. emailing, storing on PC to replay later, burning to DVD, etc.) It helps you scale the size and quality of the video as appropriate for the distribution target.
Did I mention this is free? Very hard to argue with that price. This is a fantastic way for novices like myself to throw together watchable (well, at least I think so) videos in a very short amount of time.
Paul Thurrott has a more detailed review.
Channel 9 has some Photo Story content. Start by watching the demonstration by the team, then you can also view an interview with the team.
-Chris
UPDATE (12/1/2004): From comments, people have been asking how to adjust the quality of the resulting video from the defaults. I have not tried this, but it seems you can go into your Photo Story installation directory, find the “Profiles/{your locale code}/“ directory and edit the appropriate export profile (.prx) file(s). The most likely place is the vbrquality attribute of the streamconfig node. (e.g. Change it from “95” or “98” to “100” .) Here is an example of the .prx file.