You’ve seen them, you love them: the youtube videos that aren’t actually videos, but just still photos set to music, with a few fades and wipes and some text on the screen. Some dork trying to make his lame vacation into some big dramatic quest-type thing by showing himself on top of Mt. Washington while something treacly – U2, for example – builds in the background.
Yeah, so I wanna be that guy. And I have absolutely no experience whatsoever with this kind of software. I can barely do Powerpoint.
If you have Vista, the included Windows Movie Maker can do this. Otherwise, try Google’s Picasa, a great all-around photo organizing software that just happens to make slideshows too. It’s free to boot.
If you want to actually make a video file out of a series of photos (as opposed to just having some program run a slideshow of them on the fly), there’s a bit of freeware called SSMM (Slide Show Movie Maker) that will do it quite well.
The interface is quirky and slightly buggy, but it works.
there’s also http://www.onetruemedia.com/ which I used to make a Father’s day “video” for my dad. There’s some way to put them on youtube from that site, too. I haven’t tried it so if it’s not obvious I don’t know how, but I know I’ve seen some slideshows with the logo in the corner on youtube.