Windows 7: Creating Playable Music, Picture, Video Disks of Family Reunion.

I am in conversation with a Cousin a State away that has had a family reunion and has a lot of pictures and video that she has asked me if I could create playable disks for her and others in the family.

I have done this before for myself and others using Windows DVD maker (WDVDM), I have made disks of pictures plus music, but video will be a new ballgame.

• Would WDVDM be okay for the video or does anyone know of something better?
• I am assuming that I can add music to the video Yes, or No?

One other item I thought of is; What if the video is too big to send through the emails.
I have gmail, I know I can do 10MB, and I have read where it might go as high as 25MB but I can not find anything definitive on that, and it is almost a gimme that the video files are bigger than 10, even 25MB.
I can not find anything on limits for her email service (gosps).

• Would there be a way to compress or segment the video into smaller files for email?
• What if she or others in the family have a Mac? Is there a picture/video editor that can convert to a Mac?
• Is Blu-Ray possible with WDVDM? That and the Mac question are reasons why I asked about a different video editor.

1. I would use the Windows Live Movie Maker (WLMM) for the job. You can mix movie clips and pictures, you can add music, you can lighten or darken your videos (pictures I would edit beforehand) You can add a header and trailer with your own text, you can add fancy animations between the clips and pictures. It is a very good tool.

2. One you saved your movie, it will definitely be more than you can attach to an email. But you can upload it to YouTube or Vimeo from where they can play it or download it (you can put a password on it). Just send the link. You can also put it in a .zip folder and upload it to e.g. Skydrive from where they can download it.

If you need more details, let me know.

Thank you whs if I get stuck, I will get back to you.

Right now we are going over the basics I'm pretty sure she picked some background music you would enjoy, me too.

Nice, but that is not really may kind of music. I usually use baroque music (Vivaldi, Telemann, etc.) as background.

I'll keep baroque in mind. Mozart would be included in that group also wouldn't he?

I like the idea of uploading to YouTube or Vimeo.

I checked, and I have this version of WLMM that came with our machine

, would that be okay to use?

That looks like the right thing. Open it and see whether it looks like this:

It is close, but there are some differences. I am not sure if they matter or not:

I think they are the same. I may have some options enabled that do not yet show on yours. I use that all the time.

Okay, I'll go with that.

Next on the list is to register with YouTube to create an account.

EDIT:

How much free storage does YT allow?

I already have a Picasa account and it allows 5GB, but that's probably still not enough for videos.

No idea how much YT allows. It does not say. But I have put videos there since years and it has never complained.