I recently made a photo montage of my trip to China that I wanted to get onto my iPhone and through much trial and error, was finally successful. I had over 900 hi-res digital photos that I wanted to include in the video and I wanted pans, zooms, and smooth transitions. And I wanted music. I used Photo Story 3 (free from microsoft), Windows Movie Maker (free from MS), iTunes, (free from Apple), and the Adobe Media Encoder (not free from Adobe). Photo Story 3 allows for only up 300 pictures, so first I created 3 movies comprising all 900 photos and chose no soundtrack. PS3 generated nice wmv files for those, which I imported into movie maker then added fade transitions between them and a soundtrack. Then I published from moviemaker a few different ways: one was using a dvd target becuase I wanted a dvd of the movie as well and another was targeting a windows mobile device. The mobile device target generated a 640×480 WMV file. I then used the Media encoder to try and convert it to a .mp4 file using the H.264 format and Apple iPod Video Large preset. This created the file but is was horrible. Choppy, terribly jerky, and not at all passable. So I tried something else.
I converted the wmv file using the media encoder into Quicktime format using the NTSC_DV preset. It generated a huge file, but the playback was great. I then added this file into iTunes and used iTunes to convert to mp4 by right clicking and selecting “Convert to iPhone”. I added the resulting movie to my iPhone and it plays back flawlessly.
