If you ever want to put a slideshow together but you don’t want to go out and buy software take a look at Tracking Shot. This service is a work of genius albeit one that is still under development.

Tracking shot allows you to upload photos, videos, and music and combine them into a video that can be viewed in any Flash-supporting Web browser. In fact, much of the polish of Tracking Shot comes from their use of Flash, which provides performance that is impressive.

You can upload photos directly from your PC or from Flickr and Tracking Shot, which have made bulk uploading as simple and fast as possible so that you can add a whole collection of content at once. Supported formats include JPEG, PNG and GIF for images; M4V, MP4, MPG, MOV, AVI, WMV, and FLV for videos; and MP3 and WAV for audio – the maximum size of any file is 50MB.

Once uploaded you can identify whether a photo or video is important (so that it spends more time in final show), and whether any specific area of the image is more important. You can set the order of visual elements as well as delete those you don’t want, create groups of ordered photos, set the pace of the display, and add tags. See the Tracking Shot “How to” for more details.

When you're ready you just click on “remix video” and after a few minutes your new video will start to play in your browser. The results are excellent!

Links to your videos can be e-mailed (your own e-mail client is used) and you can set videos to be public (they are private by default). Tracking Shot will also create the code for an RSS feed for your movies and for embedding a movie in a Web page or a blog.

At present Tracking Shot is free and still ironing out some minor bugs (for example, sometimes deleted items leave non-functioning thumbnails in the content panel).

The only thing that Tracking Shot doesn’t do is make your movie available for download – you can only replay it via a Web browser. Being able to download finished videos may well be a premium service.

Mark Gibbs is a consultant, author, journalist, columnist and blogger.