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Use these helpful tips to enhance your stories.
Before you begin a new story, click Configure Microphone to test your microphone. It is important to make sure that the microphone is capturing your voice correctly and that the volume is set properly before you start to narrate your story. After you preview your story, you may need to reconfigure the microphone if you are not satisfied with the narration quality or volume.
If no microphone is installed on your computer and you attempt to record narration, Photo Story may record static noise instead. If you do not have a microphone, you can use the Advanced Options dialog box to specify the number of seconds that a picture without narration will display. For more information about advanced options, see Setting advanced options.
If you want to put together your story quickly, you can import your pictures but not record any narration. If you have the time, you can choose to record narration for some or all of your pictures. As you record narration, it is recommended that you preview your story so you can check the recording volume.
To make it easier to create multiple stories, Photo Story maintains many of the settings from the previous story, including the folders you browsed when importing pictures and adding a background image.
After you select your quality settings and save your story, preview the final story to ensure that the video playback is acceptable. If the video quality is poor (for example, the video stalls or skips frames), you may want to return to the Select quality settings for your story page and change the video quality setting.
You should also consider the computers that other people will use to play your story. If some of these computers do not meet the recommended system requirements for Plus! Digital Media Edition, you may want to change your video quality setting.
Although the Windows XP operating system and Plus! Digital Media Edition are required to use Photo Story and create video stories, your friends and family do not need this software to play your stories on their computers. Your friends and family can watch your story on a computer running Windows 98 Second Edition, Windows Millennium Edition, Windows 2000, or Windows XP. They can use any program that plays Windows Media Video (WMV) files, such as Windows Media Player version 7 or later, to view your stories.
If people attempt to play your stories on computers that do not have Windows Media Player 9 Series installed, the Player will prompt them to download the required video codec from the Microsoft Web site.
You can play your stories on a portable device that has Windows Media Player 9 Series for Pocket PC installed. If you want to play your stories on a portable device that does not have Windows Media Player 9 Series for Pocket PC installed, use Windows Movie Maker to import the story and then save it using the Windows Movie Maker Pocket PC profile. You can then play the story on the portable device.
You can import your stories into other programs that support WMV files and then copy your stories onto CDs or DVDs or add special effects to the stories. For example, you can import a story into a movie-editing program, such as Windows Movie Maker, and then add movie effects to your story. You can also use DVD authoring programs to create DVDs of your stories that you can then play on your television.