Use PowerPoint to make collages for iMovie

Dec 27, '04 08:24:00AM

Contributed by: slacker

My girlfriend was working on a movie for her office holiday party, and wanted to combine several photos together to make collages. I thought about using Photoshop or another graphics program, but finally settled on this simple method -- we decided to use PowerPoint:

  1. Insert photos onto a blank slide.
  2. Resize, crop, and add shadows using the Drawing tools.
  3. Export by selecting File: Save As, and change the format from PowerPoint to JPEG.
This will save single slides as JPEG by default. Under the Options tab, you can also change PowerPoint to save all slides as a sequence of JPEGs. This trick also works using the free OpenOffice, but use File: Export to save the slide collage as JPEG.

[robg adds: Yes, this can be done relatively easily in any major graphics program. But sometimes, it's just easier to use a simpler solution. I actually use Keynote for this quite often, as I like it's layout and graphics options. It doesn't, however, have a Save as JPEG option, and using a PDF export, you'll lose transparency. So I just take a screenshot of the final layout and then use that...]

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