About a month ago, I took a trip to Mt. St. Helens while returning to Redmond from Portland. It was a beautiful day and thought I would shoot some video and take some photos for readers of the blog who may not be able to make it to the Pacific Northwest. And to bring it all together I used Windows Live Movie Maker. I shot both video and photos with my new Canon PowerShot SX20 IS. The PowerShot SX20 IS shoots both 12.1 megapixel photos and 720p HD video.

I used Windows Live Movie Maker to bring together all the clips of videos I shot (edited of course to make sense) with several photos spliced between the clips as I headed up the mountain. Windows Live Movie Maker is great for bringing both video and photos together into a single project that you can then then publish out as a video to be shared with others like friends and family. I like to think of using Windows Live Movie Maker to take in content from an experience from a location (or multiple locations), bring it all together, and make it sharable.

As you can see in the above screenshot, my “project” in Windows Live Movie Maker wasn’t too complicated – 4 video clips and 10 photos. I added a few animations to the photos (static photos are too boring!) and transitions between both the video clips and photos too.

I edited the project in widescreen 16:9 which is the native aspect ratio of the video I shot. You’ll notice the photos are also in widescreen. This took some extra part on my part to make happen. I wanted the end-result video to be completely 16:9 widescreen and 720p HD which is 1280x720 in resolution. Because my images were all at a very high resolution, I used Paint.NET 3.5 (now updated to 3.5.1) to edit the photos down to 1280x720 to fit the resolution of 720p HD video.

So here’s the end-result video:

You can also check out my Flickr set of Mt. St. Helens photos from the trip here. I uploaded these photos to Flickr via Windows Live Photo Gallery. I also created several panoramic stitches in Windows Live Photo Gallery as well which are included in the set.

You can download both Windows Live Movie Maker and Windows Live Photo Gallery as part of Windows Live Essentials here at http://download.live.com today if you haven’t already!

Yesterday, Rick Brewster announced that the final release of Paint.NET 3.5 is now available for download.

Download: Paint.NET 3.5

I had blogged about one of the initial beta releases of Paint.NET 3.5 back in August. Paint.NET 3.5 utilizes DirectWrite in Windows 7 to render text (instead of GDI). As I wrote back in August, DirectWrite is one of the new additions to the DirectX family of APIs in Windows 7 and enables better readability, adds support for a large variety of languages and scripts, and in conjunction with Direct2D provides superior rendering performance for Windows applications.

You’ll notice that with the final release of Paint.NET 3.5 – it brings some new UI changes to the application. This “refreshed” UI takes advantage of Aero in Windows 7 (and in Windows Vista). I happen to be a huge fan of the updated UI.

If you’re looking for a free and powerful application for editing graphics, give Paint.NET 3.5 a try! For a complete list of changes in Paint.NET 3.5 (since 3.36) – see Rick’s blog post.

The Paint.NET Team has announced the v3.5 of Paint.NET will use DirectWrite on Windows 7 for rendering text. DirectWrite is part of Windows 7’s text rendering enhancements. Very cool!

DirectWrite is one of the new additions to the DirectX family of APIs in Windows 7. DirectWrite enables better readability, adds support for a large variety of languages and scripts, and in conjunction with Direct2D provides superior rendering performance for Windows applications. Applications can also use DirectWrite with GDI and carry forward existing investments in the Win32 code base. You can read more about DirectWrite here.

You can download an alpha build (build 3509) of Paint.NET v3.5 here. Please be warned that alpha builds are pre-beta quality and will likely have issues. But if you want to play around, give it a try.

I created this image in Paint.NET I hope you like it.
If you want to use it on your website please link back to me.

www.noirextreme.com/earth this where I got the source from.

and to NASA as they are the owners of the imagery.