Minutes - October 3, 2008

Minutes of the October 3, 2008 meeting of the Sioux Falls Seniors Computer Club:

President Norm Knox called the meeting to order in room 204. The minutes of the September business meeting were read and approved. There was no old business. There was also no new business. During the classroom part of the meeting, Linda Bauer proposed "Organizing Files and Folders" as the topic for the November meeting. The club accepted this suggestion.

In the computer classroom, Vice President Bill Goebel described and demonstrated Photo Story 3, a free application program for processing and displaying digital photographs. Google can find various copies of this program for downloading, but it is best to download the copy that comes from Microsoft.com. The customary first step after starting Photo Story 3 is to import images. These images usually come from the My Pictures folder in My Documents. The user can key control-A to highlight and import all images at once, or individual images can be highlighted and imported separately. Photo Story 3 provides a thumbnail display of all imported images in the lower part of its window. These images can be rearranged by using the mouse to drag and drop them. Unwanted images can be deleted without affecting the originals in the folder they come from. The second step in processing the images is the collective removal of black borders. However, the user may want to skip over this step. Dealing with black borders when the pictures are edited individually may give better results. The third step begins the individual editing of images. Each image can be cropped as needed. Photo Story 3 has some of the same editing options as PhotoShop, but PhotoShop can do many things that Photo Story 3 cannot. On the other hand, Photo Story 3 can zoom in or zoom out or sweep within a picture to create movement that suggests the operation of a video camera even though the picture is really a still photo. Bill considers this to be one of the best features of the program. Titles can be added to images during editing. If the PC has a microphone, voice comments can be supplied for pictures. The duration of the display of each picture can be an automatic value, or a particular time in seconds can be specified. Many kinds of transitions between pictures are available. The program has a selection of different kinds of background music that can be added. It is desirable to save the work being done frequently during editing. When the current project is saved, it goes into a file with extension WP3. The customary folder for storing this file is My Videos in My Documents. This is also the usual folder for storing the end result. When the project is complete, it should be saved as actual video in a WMV file. The program has to go through several steps to make this file. When the WMV file is completed, it can be viewed with Windows Media Player, or it may be an input to Windows Movie Maker. If there is a possibility that further editing may be needed, theWP3 file should be saved together with the WMV file. If a PC user runs Photo Story 3 on very many digital images, the resulting output files can take up a lot of hard drive space. Moving the files to CDs or DVDs will solve this problem. When Photo Story 3 is in use, it needs a recent version of Windows Media Player on hand to show the results of editing individual pictures. This happens while Photo Story 3 itself is running. Either Version 10 or Version 11 of Windows Media Player will support Photo Story 3 properly, but an earlier version may not work right.

Respectfully submitted by Garth Peterson, Secretary.