Help me to make a movie in a pinch

[KLiTz]

Let me just say I have 2 questions.

Basically Ive been given a bunch of photos (actual photos not digital on a flash drive) and Ive been instructed to make a pictovideo or whatever you want to call it with music to go with it.

I need to scan the photos in order to get them into a digital format and usable for a movie, which brings me to my first question:

If I scan them in a collage, could someone give me a program or tips that would make cropping a photo individually out of the collage and saving it as its own file and repeatedly do this for the remaining photos. Basically, quick and efficient is what Im aiming for.

Secondly, once I have said photos. Could someone recommend a user friendly program that makes video creation easy.

Thank you to anyone in advance who can help.

[Frank Munoz]

to answer your two questions
-gimp/trial photoshop
-windows movie maker

you can look around for other programs as well which look friendlier to you
but these are the one's i'd use as i'm familiar with them

windows movie maker can export pictures to multiple video formats at very high qualities.
just upload the photos to wmm and set their durations to "~0.033333 seconds(you can juts put 0.03)" each for a bit over 30 fps video, and just add what ever music you want.

If you want 60 fps, unfortunately i'm not sure if later models of wmm can export at 60 fps as the version i have only allows a minimum of 0.03 seconds for each picture.

I'd suggest some research if you really want 60 fps and look up what programs can do what.

as for cropping,
the default paint program can crop. might be a bit tedious though.
you can try out the free trail of photo shop to crop, gimp, uh.. lotsa programs can crop. But i don't know any that mass crop collages quickly...
if you were to scan a collage it'd have to be a good one
(unless you mean it's on film then that's another side to this)

I'm not sure what resolution you want for this movie though(you might have to switch the dpi and/or have higher resd pictures to use), or how many pictures there , or if you have your own scanner, or if you even want it to be a high frame rate motion stop. so some of this may not even be information you need.
but from what's provided it looks like a really big project which, if you've never done something like this before, will require some studying on how to correctly do this if you want it done well.

if you can show us how the college/pictures are formatted(if it's on paper/film/etc) and how you plan to scan them we could help you more

[Spenner]

Trial version of Adobe Primeir or After Effects CS6 imo... applying a layer mask or constraining edges of photos to be cut off past the artboard size is useful and easy as far as cropping goes. You basically have limitless potential for what you want to do. I haven't used the latest version of movie maker but once you learn AfterEffects (take the 20-30 mins to get the basics down... its worth it), the rest will be pretty seamless. And moving forward, is a huge time saver down the road.

But that's if you are planning more of these. If this is a hot item, sure, windows movie maker, and I'm sure you can crop frames easily in the program. Perhaps a way to export each still image too, if need be.

Good luck. Should not need it though. Look up tutorials or resources on slide shows in Movie Maker if you are confused, and then adding music is the easy part.