Meet the Photo Story 3 Team

The Photo Story 3 product is really sweet. Cant wait to get my picture frame project finished to figure ways to use Photo Storries. I think the easiest way would be to write a C# app embedding WMP looking for new files in a shared folder. Then i can make storries on my desktop and store them on the picture frame using the network.

Planning some cool software for my frame, probably using Photo Story and Fotovision.

Hey guys. I bet Photo Story is a good product. I'm sure it does what you think it should do. However, you appear to have made a phenomenal mistake. Do any of you work on high res screens?! I have 3 LCD monitors running at 1280 x 1024 and guess what? The photostory window occupies about 1/4 of the monitor and THERE IS NO MAXIMIZE OR RESIZE capability!

Let me say this... O M G !

Come on people. Good heavens! Make it resizable, there just aren't that many controls on the form that would make it more than a day of work!!!

Windows Movie Maker has no trouble with this.

Nice try, looks good - through a microscope.

follesoe - did you play Sherminator in the American Pie movies?

There is something very weird with the PhotoStory 3 encoder profiles for DVD (both NTSC and PAL). While all the others will give a fine result (for instance on a PC screen in 1280x768 pixels format) these two produce a videofile in .WMV format with images that are so "fuzzy" that one wouldn't possibly dare to show it even to family or friends !!!

Changing one or more parameters with the Windows Media Profiles Editor doesn't help if you keep the same filename (using "save and close").
 
But if, without changing anything to the original profile, you "export" it and give it another filename (for instance newDVDprofile.prx), this new profile which is in fact identical -except for the filename- to the original one, will produce a nice videofile with images as sharp as the pictures that were used to create the slideshow !!!

So it seems that behind the stage the PhotoStory 3 rendering software does something special when using one of these two profiles: "smoothing" of all the pictures, similar to what is called "feathering" in Paint Shop Pro, but then on the whole surface. And this process is triggered only by the special content of these rather unusual filenames: {3E54A8AB- … }.prx or {913A60D4 -…}.prx

It is almost impossible to think that this might be a bug, so it was done on purpose. But then why isn't all this documented by Microsoft? In fact this "smoothing" could be a nice feature if the user would have some kind of key to control/attenuate the process. 

It would be very interesting for the many enthusiastic users of PhotoStory 3
all over the world if the Microsoft Software Design Team could give their comments on all this !!!

Where can I find the SDK for making the plug-ins that they are talking about at the end of this video?

I'm trying to figure out how to do this in C#. I have found some info in the Windows Encoder SDK, but I haven't managed to pulll it off. I'm hoping some member of the Photostroy team will give me some tips