I want to make a simple video from a still image. Basically cropped then slowly pan across it. any pointers, I’ve got photo editting software and windows movie maker, not keen on buying expensive video software. My googling isn’t working as all I get is tips on extracting stills from videos

If you want to be able to pan on a still image then that is quite a specialist requirement. There’s not much software that can do that, maybe After Effects.

yep 2 minute job in ae, you could do it in flash too. two keyframe positions within a timeline.

Thanks for the tip but that’s a bit pricey for this job.

Apparently it is possible with the vista and windows7 versions of WMM but I’ve got XP. I’ve just found Photostory3, which is free from microsoft, and does exactly what I need.

Premier Elements has it. Not free but cheap and you can download a 30-day eval to make sure you can do what you want.

I reckon Camtasia Studio could do it – it has a fully functional trial version. I’d love a full copy but its pretty expensive.
Worth a try:
http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia-features.html

I made this in about 10 minutes, as test to see if it could do training videos
[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIDaaBVCHPA[/video]

Then the trial expired 🙁

Simple with Camtasia – just done with the trial:

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YDSgAg_x_A[/video]

Thanks for the replies chaps. I started with Photostory3 which was OK but pretty limiting in the output options so I moved onto photofilmstrip which seems much better, a few output formats and HD.