John Ward said:
What is the recommended lossless picture format to import into MovieMaker
2?
Should I use .jpg or something else?
BMP format is reported to be the best. However I never had any issues with
JPGs either...
What do you mean lossless? If the source is originally captured in JPG (as
most digital cameras do), then you wont increase any quality by just
converting it to a lossless format.
Also, for best results in the video, should I size the pictures (before
importing) to 800x600 or 640x480?
If you do resize the pictures then use a good quality preserving resizing
software. In my opinion best results are obtained with a custom profile
using width and height that are exactly equal or half or quarter size of the
original source pictures. The custom profile should not use the non-square
pixel encoding. Note DV-AVI uses non-squre pixel encoding as per its
definition, hence it is not the best choice for square-pixel source such as
still images.
A related question, should I just use my Photostory to transition the
pictures and just import the .AVI file?
Photostory does not produce .AVI files.
But yes you can apply the pan zoom effects in photostory and bring the
resultant clips (WMV) into Movie Maker. However the quality of the
Photostory wont be preserved when MovieMaker produces its movie since it
would encode using a different codec which is not as optimized as
Photostory's special codec.
You may be interested in my Pan Zoom effects for Movie Maker and other
utilities on my website.