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Portable Photostories

“By the toll of a billion deaths, man has bought his birthright of the earth. For neither do men live nor die in vain.”
- War of the Worlds

Microsoft today launched Digital Image Suite 2006, a package of tools designed to help consumers organize, enhance and share digital memories. It has some handy features like support for sharing photos and videos with PocketPCs and phones. Among the features;

Hierarchical Keywords and Labels provide stacked tags for users to organize, sort through and find images.
Hover Thumbnail enlarges thumbnail images, making it easy to view the image, along with details such as date taken, file type and size, resolution, and assigned labels.
Video support offers the option to view and organize videos in the same place as photos.
RAW Support for Canon and Nikon cameras lets users view and organize images shot in RAW category of formats, and save the RAW format as a JPEG or TIF file.
Black & White Effects transforms color photos into black-and-white images with preset filters, altering color tone or manipulating each of the color channels.
Intuitive Crop analyzes the composition of a photo and suggests a way to crop it that will properly frame the subject.
Photo Story 3.1 lets users create a photo show with voice narration, customizable pans and zooms, and music, make quick edits (red-eye removal, apply black- and-white filter), create an original soundtrack, and burn a CD with high-resolution VCD files, for playing back on a TV.
Sharing Disc lets users burn photo CDs without disrupting detailed photo archive settings.
Device Sync Support makes it easy to share photos and videos with mobile devices such as the Portable Media Center, Pocket PCs and Smartphones through syncing with Windows Media Player. Consumers flag the desired images, and the next time the mobile device syncs with the PC, the photos will automatically transmit.

Photo Story 3 (review) is also available from Microsoft — free. You can download it free, here. Microsoft uses it to check if your system is “legal”. The Windows XP–only video-slide-show utility lets you create “Ken Burns-style” motion and music effects. The program is smart enough to zoom in on eyes. Long panoramas will pan smoothy (automatically taking more time if necessary). Still photos can maintain high resolution even with a 10-to-1 virtual zoom (assuming a high resolution original). Synthesized music can also be chosen that times itself automatically to finish with your show.

Photostory just manipulates still images, overlaying them with soundtrack and manipulation instructions. It looks like video (with panning and zooming), but the file size is smaller and it has better resolution. Shooting, storing and editing still photos is much, much, faster, cheaper and easier than video. PhotoStories can be embeded in a webpage or blown up full screen. Quick and easy.

It’s a snap to mix photos with music and narration and play back uses standard WindowsMedia format so no special player is required (on Microsoft devices). If I ran XP on my laptop, I’d add Photostory in a heartbeat. I love this program. Did I mention it was free?

Want to put video on your portable device?

Microsoft’s Moviemaker can save movies for playback on PocketPC devices.

Plextor’s PX-TV100U’s ($79) has a built-in TV tuner to record (via USB 2.0) to your PC’s hard disk, CD, or DVD recorder in MPEG-1 (VCD), MPEG-2 (DVD), or DivX video formats. You then manage the PVR with SageTV Lite PVR software which features a 3-day electronic programming guide for quick setup of recordings. It ships with Ulead VideoStudio SE for editing and authoring interactive DVDs.

PVR Blog reviews some of the options for recording video to your PC like Microsoft’s Media Center, SnapSteram, and MythTV. Streaming multimedia content from your home to a remote PC (or other device) can be enabled with a Slingbox settop ($249), Orb Networks box, Sony Location Free TV, or TiVoToGo. They connect to your TV set, cable box, DVR or computer. A broadband connections feeds it to you.

MPEG-1/2/4 Storage Capacity
Video Encoder/Decoder	Compression bit rate		*Video Record Times (mins)**
Video Encoder/Decoder	Video (Kbps)	Audio (Kbps)	CD-R/RW	RDVD	Resolution
MPEG-1 (VCD)	1,090	224	73	N/A	SIF
MPEG-2 (DVD-Video)	2,419	224	36	N/A	2/3 D1
MPEG-4	1,800 - 7,200	224	12/47	80-295	SIF- Full D1

Kinoma Producer 3 ($29) turns your desktop digital media files into Kinoma and MPEG-4 movies for playback on almost any Palm Powered handheld with Kinoma Player 3 or Sony PlayStation Portable (PSP). Here’s how to get TV onto a PlayStation Portable.

Podcasting with iTunes 4.9 is free. It’s easy. Photostories and video clips may soon tag along. The New York Times knows how to do this. It’s not rocket science.

I don’t know how else to put it…newspaper execs are fools. They don’t know anything. They can’t imagine the future. Their assets walk out of the door every night. Some won’t be coming back.