No
movie would be complete without some background music. It is
important to choose music that is appropriate to your story.
As a general rule, songs with lyrics do not work well -- the
lyrics of the song will compete with your narration, so it is
best to choose instrumental music. You are not limited to a
single piece of music. You can add more than one piece of music
per movie. Here's the starting point for adding music:
Notice
that you have two options for music: you can either select music
that you have already downloaded to your computer, or you can
create music from selections provided by Photo Story. We're
going to use the Create Music option for our
story.
To
begin, select the first image where you want the music to begin
playing. For our story, we want the music to start when the
first image is displayed, so we'll select the first image (click
once on it to select it) and then click the Create Music
button. From here you will make your choices:
Select
the genre, style, band, mood, tempo and intensity that suit
your piece. To test out your choices, press Play.
When you're satisfied with your choices, press OK.
Once you press OK, the music is added to your piece and is shown
by a bar above the image timeline. Notice that Photo Story automatically
adjusts the length of the piece to the length of your story
(thank you, Photo Story -- this would be a tedious task if you
had to do it manually!).
This
is a good time to preview your project. Be sure the first slide
is selected so it will play from the beginning, then click the
Preview button and watch the show. If you decide
you don't like your music choice after all, just click the Delete
Music button and start over selecting music for your
piece. If you later decide to edit your piece by deleting images,
adding images, changing the narration, adding motion or transitions,
the music will automatically adjust to the new length of your
piece. This feature alone makes this program worth its weight
in gold. The preview (at 320 x 240) lets you see what your story
will look and sound like in the final version. Because the preview
window is relatively small, the quality is relatively high.
The quality may not be this good in the final version, depending
on how you decide to output it. But more about that later ...
STOP
-- don't click the Next button yet. We need
to talk about saving your project first.
