Q. I have a bunch of photographs I want to put to music and turn into a video. What's the easiest way to do this?

A. My wife and I just had twins and whenever she hears the Phil Collins song "You'll be in my heart," she starts crying. Being a good husband, I thought it was a great idea to put together pictures of our babies to that song and make it a video for her, to reduce her to a blubbering wreck when she watched it.

I was very happy to find that Windows Live Movie Maker (which is available for free download) makes it really easy. Basically you just do the following:

1. Click Add videos and photos to browse to the pictures you want and add them, or just drag pictures from Explorer into Windows Live Movie Maker wherever in the timeline you want them to go.
2. Once you've added the pictures, click Add music and browse to the music file you want to play in the background.
3. Now select a style for your movie. When you apply a theme, Movie Make automatically adds transitions randomly between pictures and adds effects, such as making some black and white. Depending on the theme, it might add an introduction text you can edit and may add some at the end.
4. In the project area, you can set the aspect ratio between widescreen and standard. There's also a button to fit all the pictures to the music you've added.
5. Play around with the Animations and Visual Effects areas to set custom transitions and photo effects.
6. Select Save movie and you can save for high definition displays (1080p), phones, and many other formats. You can also share directly to locations such as SkyDrive and Facebook.

It worked great and I was very happy with the result. My wife cried a lot. Now if only there was a Live program to help me get more sleep .