Yet Another Story About What is Cool about Apple
My parents came over on Saturday to do some computer work. My mother needed a presentation done and I only had a vague idea what she wanted. Little did I know that she had just a vague idea as well. What she wanted was a set of pictures of “sandhill cranes”:http://www.savingcranes.org/species/sandhill.cfm set to music. But she had no pictures and she forgot the CD with the song she wanted! So it was back to Square One.
I went to our CD cabinet and took a few samples out. I put one of the CD’s into the MacBook Pro and we listened to a few songs in “iTunes”:http://www.apple.com/ilife/iphoto/ . She chose one and I ripped it into my hard drive. So we googled around and found “pictures of sandhill cranes”:http://images.google.com/images?q=sandhill%20cranes and imported them directly into “iPhoto”:http://www.apple.com/ilife/iphoto/ (Command-Click on a picture in Safari and then choose “Import to iPhoto”).
After that, we made an album in iPhoto just for this project and put the photos in there. We chose to make a slideshow, chose the song we ripped earlier from iTunes, and then put the picture in the proper order. We played the slideshow many time, tweaking the timing of one slide to another, add more pictures, taking others away. Finally, we had our slideshow. And it turned very professional looking.
But wait! This was probably going to play on a Windows PC. How do we move it over! Well, File-> Export will generate a Quicktime movie of that slideshow. I burned that movie and the Windows version of “VLC”:http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ so that it can be played full screen.
This whole process took us three hours, from finding the music to burning the movie onto a CD. Not bad at all. It was almost all about getting into your “iLife”:http://www.apple.com/ilife/ except for VLC. C’mon Apple — let the free version of QuickTime Player play fullscreen.