Nowadays sharing your digital photos with family and friends is such an easy thing to do. But the next time you're thinking about sharing your latest batch of photos, don't just e-mail them or put them all on a disk and send them off in the mail. Take a little bit of extra time and make photo movies to dvd with background music and DVD menu templates using Wondershare DVD Slideshow Builder.

With DVD Slideshow Builder, you also have the option of using video clips in your photo movie dvd. Your photo movie can contain a combination of still photos, video clips, and audio—it's up to you. Viewing your photos with stunning transitions and background music will definitely make an impression the next time you decide to share your photos.

You can still share your finished photo movie by e-mail or by burning it to a DVD/HD DVD/VCD disc, but watching it will be a much better experience for your audience. Making a photo movie DVD is fun and easy and doesn't take much time.

Here's what you'll need:

Wondershare DVD Slideshow Builder Version 4.0 or later
Digital photos/videos located in your hard disk
Digital music located in your hard disk

In the following how-to, I'll make a home movie to DVD using DVD Slideshow Bulder. There are so many features in the software that you could spend hours on one photo movie, but getting started is pretty simple. Where you go from there is up to you.

Step 1: Import images, videos, and audios
After I edit the images I want to use, I find the folder I saved them in. In this case, I'll just add the whole folder. Click on the first button on the Tool Bar located above the Story Board and select “Add Photo/Video”, press CTRL+A to select all the files in the pop-up window, and then click “Open” to import. This works the same way for videos, but for audio, what’s the only different is that click the second button on the Tool Bar. The files you added will be displayed on the Story Board at the bottom.



Step 2: Choose transition & motion Effects
DVD Slideshow Builder has close to 200 different transition and motion effects to pick from, which includes 2D & 3D effects. Click on a transition thumbnail between two slides and you can look at all of them by dragging the slide bar. If you click on any of them, you can see a preview in the bottom left. To choose one, double click on it. Also, click on a transparent pentacle on the bottom left of a slide and you can select one effect for each slide. The pentacle will become blue if an effect was added on the slide.



Step 3: Timing
All the images I added show up in the Story Board now. This step makes a huge difference in the feel of the show. You can change the slide times and transition times to make the show go as fast or slow as you want. Set different timing accords to different effects to make the slideshow look the best. Just double click on the timing underneath the slide thumbnail and transition thumbnail and then set to one as you want.



Step 4: Time Line
With DVD Slideshow Builder Version 4, a brand-new feature TimeLine was added. This feature helps users much easier to adjust the starting and ending position of the audios and captions.



Step 5: Edit Slides
This is where things really get interesting. Double-click on any slide to open Edit Photo/Video. Here, you can crop the slide, add effects for slide, make image adjustments, and so on. It’s so easy, and you will learn how to do by using.



Step 6: Add Intro/End Credits
Now it’s time to add intro/end credits to make it just like a real movie. The credits you created will appear in the beginning and ending position of the Story Board. Right click on the first slide and select “Insert Blank Slide”, and then click the third button “Add Text” to add captions for the credit movies. This works the same way to add End Credits but “Add blank slide” at the end of the photo movie.



Step 7: Customize your DVD menu
More than 160 professional designed DVD menu templates are available to use for any occasions. Choose your favorite templates to make your photo movie look good at the first sight. Drag the positions of the frame, text, play button to anywhere as you want. Customizing the DVD menu is also a fun. Just click the button “Custom…” at the bottom left and then change the background images to your very own, and set the “Layout” & “Frame Style” to make your DVD menu unique.



Step 8: Preview photo movie
At any point, you can preview your photo movie to see how it's coming along. In the “Slideshow” Tab, click the black Play button and the preview will start. But if you want to preview more than one slideshows with DVD menu, please switch to “Preview” Tab and click on the number to preview the corresponding movie.



Step 9: Output
When I am through making a photo movie, there are generally two ways that I distribute the show: burning as a DVD/ HD-DVD/ VCD disc and converting as a MPEG-I/ MPEG-II/ MPEG-IV/ AVI/ WMV/ 3GP video. DVD Slideshow Builder has built-in DVD authoring with all kinds of options, from quality settings and encoding options. This saves a lot of time because I don't have to use any other software to create menus or burn DVDs. My family and friends love watching my photo movies on their TV and I love sharing that experience with them. Using video output, I can convert photo movies to videos directly for use on mobile devices like iPod®, iPhone®, Zune™, PSP®, cell phone and more.

 

 

Thanks for the how to.

DVDs are a great way to backup photos from computer for storage and share. With inexpensive prices, a standard single layer DVD can store 4.7GB of data while a dual layer one has a capacity of 8.5GB and both easily to be burned copies by common DVD writer for share. For larger capacity, Blu-ray disc (25 GB single layer, 50 GB dual layer, 100GB 4 layer, 200GB 8 layer) may be a better choice. But problems of these high-tech products are not only the costliness of BD discs, reader, writer and player but also the non-popular of use and result in the disaster of share. So, I still use the common DVDs.

In order to start putting photos on DVDs, a DVD writer is needed. The speed of the writer all depends on what type of DVD drive you have. 1X DVD write speed indicates that the DVD writer can burn your data roughly the same speed that a DVD player can read a DVD. So if your DVD writer writes at 16X that's 16 times faster.

You don’t need to burn a specially formatted disc but just a regular data DVD full of digital photos if you own a DVD player with built-in slide-show features for viewing JPEG images. Lots of new type DVD players have the features such as Sony DVP-NS57P, Pioneer DV-490V-S, LG DN788, Panasonic DVD-S53S/K, Philips DVP5982 and etc. Different types of players with different play menu, photo quantity limitation and so on. So, DVDs display in this style via my Sony player but that on my friend’s Panasonic.

If your DVD player doesn’t have such features, creating DVD photo slide shows via apps will be help and it is a much more stunning and professional way for storage and share. Bellows are kinds of apps.

1. Free apps that can create photo slideshows.

Google’s Picasa, is a free software download from Google. Picasa can make photo slideshows with simple clicks and copy files to DVD media using both the "Backup" and "Gift CD" features, but DVDs create by Picasa can not be played on all types of DVD players.

Windows Movie Maker 2, included free in XP and Vista, helps to create AVI or WMA slideshows. Although it doesn’t natively burn DVDs playable by many DVD players, Windows Movie Maker has many powerful features (say exquisite effects) to magnetize users and adding DVD writing capabilities to Windows Movie Maker with inexpensive applications will figure it out.

2. Commercial apps wholly make for creating DVD slide shows.

Nero PhotoShow Deluxe 5 ($39.99) is famous and powerful software which includes a massive amount of slide-show-authoring options for photo DVDs. Nero has a 15-day trial for PhotoShow Deluxe, while the free PhotoDVD trial lets you create slide shows with up to 100 images. As a sub-product from Nero, it has highly stability on its writing capability.

DVD Slideshow Builder 4 ($39.95), another professional and popular app that can create DVD photo slideshows with photos, video clips and music in high-resolution HD DVD video format and burn directly. It provides a free trial version with Watermark on output, 30-day trial limitation. What it attract me is its plenty 2D/3D transitions and Ken-Burns effects.

Although photo online sharing is a hot trend, such as Flick.com, DVDs displayed via TV set and player can not be instead by other things. It is in a popular style for years.