If you are making a slide show movie of your art for youtube or other video hosting site, you want your movie and art to look its best. Ever wondered why you have black space around images in a windows movie maker slide show? If you read the Animal Loving Artists on youtube post, you'll see I faced a challenge in dealing with varying, untidy amounts of black space. Some images are obviously the wrong dimensions to fill a full-screen, and I'll be dealing with those later in a separate post.
What about images that appear the right dimensions, but don't quite fit full screen? You are either left with black lines at the sides, or at top and bottom, or surrounding the image when its imported into your movie maker collections. Look at the three images below and you'll see what I mean. This post outlines one method for cropping an image to get it full-screen dimensions for use in movie maker. (See the links at the end of this post for more on making a slide show movie with movie maker.)
How to Get a full-screen Image
This applies to images that are almost the right dimensions but don't quite fit. You can crop your image so it fits full-screen. The bottom line here is that to be full-screen, an image must have an aspect ratio of 4:3. If you are not graphically/technically trained or mathematical minded, this may seem a little daunting. The easiest solution is to use image editing software that will do it all for you. Fastone Image Viewer is one such program - its an open source project, so its free to download and use non-commercially, and there's no spyware/adware. You can download it at http://www.faststone.org/.
To crop an image to 4:3 ratio using Fastone Image Viewer
Open Fastone. Open the directory your image is located in, by double-clicking on it in the left-hand directory view panel.
You will see your images in that directory tiled in the main right-hand panel. Select your image for editing by clicking on it, so it is highlighted and also appears in the preview box.
Next select the crop tool (circled below) from the menu bar by clicking on it.
Then in the Crop Board window, select a ratio to 4:3 from the paper ratio drop down menu (circled below), and select crop. 
Select crop to file, to save your cropped image and follow the prompts, or you could select crop to clipboard and paste your image into another program once you have opened it.
Also see:
Make a Slide Show Video of your Art for Youtube
And We have Youtube Sound
Add Youtube Videos to your Blog, Website or Ebay
Original Art by Naj on Youtube
Animal Loving Artists on Youtube
5 comments:
Thanks Naj, The good advice keeps coming. I guess I am too busy fiddling to get down to really understanding and perfecting. I always seem to have just one more thing to do before I can get around to it. Don't know whether this is procrastination, sloppiness or laziness but whilst you keep coming up with the answers, does it matter?
LOL, the aspect ratio and black edges thing were driving me mad, I needed to know why it was happening!
Thank you very much, it was really helpful, of you posting the problem clearly in Google, so that i could find it easily, and thanks a lot for the providing the solution and taking the effort of even showing how to do it... Internet is a good place.. only because of few people like you..
great work Mate..
Thanks Naj! The aspect ratio and black edges were driving me mad too!! You saved me a lot of time and frustration.
Thank You very much, this really helped!
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