[LizaJane]

I have been trying to work with Window Movie Maker but have hit some snags and was wondering if anyone could suggest a good program for taking your photos and turning them into a slideshow movie and being able to add music to it as well.

My daughter recently got married and I gathered all the photos (over 500!) from the different people at the wedding and put them into this slideshow and added music to it. It turned out great but when I try to save it as a movie the program gives me error messages and won't save it as a movie. My hopes are to have a finished product that I can burn to a CD/DVD and have it play on a DVD player.

I've looked online and there seems to be a lot of them out there but it's hard to tell which one might be better. So if anyone can give some suggestions I would be greatful. I can't spend a lot of money so something cheap would be great LOL I've also looked at Office Depot but there were so many to choose from and they ranged from around 30 bucks to over 100 so I wasn't sure which one to go with.

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Check out Pictures to Exe. I use this program to do exactly what you want. There is a slight learning curve, but there is also a forum that will help you learn. The software is quite powerful and you can check out some examples of what the program can do here

[makai]

Check out Pictures to Exe. I use this program to do exactly what you want. There is a slight learning curve, but there is also a forum that will help you learn. The software is quite powerful and you can check out some examples of what the program can do here

[jsef120]

you can use pinnacle its simple and user friendly ^^ its a bit buggy but works just fine on slides and simple videos

[franklin]

This response is likely much too late.... However, I do the same as what I think you are looking for. We take a ton of photos, and some video and like to make it into a slideshow with music and titles, etc. Windows Movie Maker is very user friendly and comes with or is a free download for Windows. Photostory is available as well, but I tend to prefer movie maker because it gives more options like transitions and effects, and Photostory is no longer part of Windows (although I understand it still can be downloaded for free and works with Vista. Both are very user friendly. The other advantage I found in using WMM at first is that there is lots of support from similar users in various discussion forums like one called papajohn.org. Very useful for beginners.

Recently I decided I wanted something better and have tried (downloaded trial versions) a large number of other programs. I have tried Pinnacle in the past and still found it a little cumbersome and buggy. I also tried the Roxio product and found the same. Others like Muvee Reveal and Magix Movie Edit Pro were not as good as Windows Movie Maker, for what I was looking for. Sony Vegas looked very good but was a more complex product than I wanted. Ultimately, I think the best for my purposes is Corel Video Studio 12. I have been trying it for a week now and it seems excellent. Next on my list was the Adobe product, but I have generally found a bigger learning curve for their stuff, like Photoshop. I think the Corel product is the one I will purchase.

[123Runner]

I had Pinnacle ver 10 for Capturing my VHS tapes and editing them. It worked fine on XP. Went to my sons Vista computer (which is very fast), upgraded per Pinnacle to 10.8 (also tried version 12) and had nothing but problems. Other users of Pinnacle reported similar issues of buggy software and capture issues.

I wanted something free. I found VideoPad Editor and windows movie maker to suit my needs for the video editing and the still picture editing.
They are probably not as elaborate as the paid programs, but, They have simple transitions and text editing in them.