Digital Photography: Using Windows XP
This information is Copyright January 2006 by
http://www.santaclausca.com and Loring Windblad. References for
this article include the author's personal knowledge and
experience. Additional information references with first
article. This article may be freely copied and used on other web
sites only if it is copied complete with all links and text,
including this header, intact and unchanged except for minor
improvements such as misspellings and typos.
The title of this article is actually Digital Photography: Using
Windows XP (to manage your digital pictures). If you have read
my previous articles, Digital Photography: The Basics and
Digital Photography: Choosing Your Camera, you have a pretty
good idea that all of a sudden one trip can really put a lot of
megabytes onto your computer hard disk.
Just as an example here, if I shoot 20 still images (JPGs) I
will be adding about 16-17 MB of pictures to my collection. If I
shoot 1 minute of .AVI video clip that alone is about 14 MB of
data. So 10 minutes of video runs about 145 MB. You have a 128
MB memory chip? Well, better go to 256 MB and a couple of them.
If you're doing lots of video, get more. So 10 minutes of video
and 30 pictures takes up 170 MB. It only takes about 6 of these
sessions to put a whole gigabyte of pictures on your HD! You're
gonna take a trip for 2 weeks? Someplace you've never been
before? You had better take along about 5-6 or more extra 512 MB
memory chips. You came home and you've got 3 gigabytes of
pictures and video to sort and store and prepare for the web?
And take selected pictures and make photo prints of them for
your photo album? WOW! HELP! Well, that's what I'm here for.
Let's take a look at our old computers. They were 1.1 gHz AMD
Duron CPUs with 2 each 60 GB HD's and Windows 2000...and we were
running out of space. Both HD's were partitioned*. My sweetie
and I have one computer each, twins of one another, and
networked for file sharing, etc. Well, they got old (3 years, 4
now) and so 31 December a year ago we built new ones. These are
3200 AMD Athlon-64s with 1 gb of RAM, 2 each 160 gb of HD,
Windows XP SP2 and most of the basic bells and whistles.
Further, the first HD, with the O/S, is partitioned, but the
second HD is not partitioned, giving us a single 160 GB "work
space" to edit videos and movies and etc.
Partitioning your HD is not important to your digital
photography and your digital or film camera. But it is important
to how you handle and store and work with your digital images
when you put them onto your computer. First, as a minimum, you
should have at least two partitions. They would be C, D and E.
Then you would have your second HD, un-partitioned, as F.
Your C partition would be about 15-20 GB and it would hold your
installed O/S and all your installed operating programs - and
nothing else! Your D partition would be about the same and it
would hold all your email files. Your E partition would be the
rest of your work, all the things you create and save, letters,
pictures, designs, writing, etc. And your F would be
un-partitioned to provide the maximum sized workspace you can
have for manipulating your digital picture files, making movies,
etc. It would also provide, if you wanted it, a backup of your C
partition.
Example: You are hit by a virus, you cannot clean it as there is
no cure out for it yet and it will destroy your computer the
moment you boot your system. If you use any of your programs you
will begin infecting other things. Your only solution is to
format your C partition. If you only have one partition on your
HD, this means you have now lost everything you had on your
computer and must start over. If you have partitioned it as
above you will only lose your installed programs and Windows.
You can format it, copy the backup from your F drive and you are
back in business - and no virus.
Remember in the previous articles that we went to
http://www.santaclausca.com twice and checked for two different
things about the video clips? Well, what you need to know about
them is this (dealing with only the second one, the video CD).
It is approximately 23 MB on the web - and on my HD. That's BIG
you say? Yes....and no. Yes, it is pretty big. But no, its also
actually pretty small. Lets take a look at just how it was
created and how big - or small - it really is!
First, all versions of Windows came with a sound recorder;
Windows XP is no different in that respect. But Windows XP SP2
also comes with a Windows Movie Maker. It makes movies for you
in .WMV format - Windows Media Video. And it makes those movies
from either video clips or still jpg clips or a combination of
video and still images. Finally it will use either .AVI or .MPG
video and probably just about any stills, including .JPG and
.GIF all scrunched into one final video output.
But that's just the icing on the cake. It will also play the
audio you had as part of your video clips as part of the final
output and you can add in your own audio clips made in the Sound
Recorder. You can also add in MP3 music clips and possibly even
MIDI (MP2) audio clips, and make them a part of your .WMV
presentation. You just have to be a little careful not to
overlap your audio portions. Finally you can add in titling on
your finished video production, especially helpful if you are
making a slide presentation.
OK, back to my Santa video. I used two 1-minute video clips and
a couple which were shorter. The 1-minute clips were 14+ mb
each. The shorter ones were 2, 4 and 5 mb. And I used several
stills at 500 kb each. Then I added a couple of audio .WAV clips
at a couple of megabytes each! The total was about 45 megabytes
and I was aghast! But, well, I did it, I liked it (finally), and
so I saved it. I figured that Windows Movie Maker would create
something larger than the composite parts - a very reasonable
supposition, ordinarily! Much to my surprise, the resultant .WMV
production came in at a slim, trim and svelte 23 MB! Voila! I
was impressed. It also runs 3