Section 15.2. Editing Video: Home Basic Home Premium Ultimate


15.2. Editing Video: Home Basic Home Premium Ultimate

Once you've accumulated a few clips, it's time to conduct some general organizationrearranging the clips; trimming off excess footage from the ends; adding credits, music, and effects, and so on.

15.2.1. Phase 1: Organize Your Clips

Icons for the clips you've imported gather in the Collection area at the center of the screen. (Behind the scenes, they're really in your Personal Videos folder.)

Double-click a clip to see it play in the monitor window. The Space bar (or the letter K key) pauses and resumes playback. Press F2 to rename a clip.


Tip: The scroll wheel on your mouse is a scrubbing wheel. Turn it to shuttle backward and forward in a clip that's playing for precise cursor positioning.

15.2.2. Phase 2: Drag Them into the Storyboard

Your real job here, though, is assembling your clips into a coherent , complete video masterpiece by dragging them into the timeline at the bottom of the screen. Movie Maker can display this horizontal strip in either of two ways, depending on your current selection in the View pop-up menu (Figure 15-3):

  • Storyboard . In this view, each clip appears as an icon, like a slide on a slide viewer. Each is the same size , even if one is eight minutes long and the next is only two.

  • Timeline . In this view, each clip is represented by a horizontal bar whose width represents the clip's playback duration. Additional parallel "tracks" represent soundtracks playing simultaneously , titles and credits, and transition effects.

Whichever view you choose, this is where you'll organize the scenes of your movie. Drag the clips from the Clips area (shown in Figure 15-1) down into this area to place them in the order you want. You can rearrange them once they're there, too, simply by dragging. You can also trim unwanted material off the beginning or end of each clip by dragging the triangles in each icon.

As you go, you can preview your film in progress by choosing Play Play Storyboard or Play Timeline, depending on which window youre working with; either way, the keyboard shortcut is Ctrl+W. As usual, the Space bar pauses or resumes playback.


Tip: Choose View Full Screen (or press Alt+Enter) to make the movie fill your monitor as it plays back. Unless youre working with digital video, the blotchy, blurry enlargement may trigger your innate demand-your-money-back instincts . But this trick is useful, for example, when showing your finished movie to a group of people in a room. From a few feet away, the poor picture quality isn't as noticeable.

15.2.3. Phase 3: Chop Up the Clips

As you work, you may frequently find it useful to cut your clips into smaller pieces, thereby eliminating boring material. You can do this in either of two ways:

  • Split a clip . After aligning the scroll bar underneath the Preview pane with the spot where you want the clip chopped, choose Clip Split, press M, or click the Split button (shown in Figure 15-3). Movie Maker turns the single clip into two different clips, adding a number to the name of the second one.

  • Trim a clip . Sometimes you just want to trim off unwanted footage from either end of a clipa task Movie Maker lets you perform only after you've added a clip to the Timeline. Then drag the triangle handles, which you can see in Figure 15-3.

15.2.4. Phase 4: Add Video Transitions

What happens when one clip ends and the next one begins? In about 99.99 percent of all movies, music videos, and commercials, you get a cut . That's the technical term for "nothing special happens at all." One scene ends, and the next one begins immediately.

Professional film and video editors, however, have at their disposal a wide range of transitions special effects that smooth the juncture between one clip and the next. For example, the world's most popular transition is the crossfade or dissolve , in which the end of one clip gradually fades away as the next one fades in. The crossfade is so popular because it's so effective. It gives a feeling of softness and grace to the transition, and yet it's so subtle that the viewer might not even be conscious of its presence.

Like all DV editing programs, Movie Maker offers a long list of transitions, of which crossfades are only the beginning. Movie Maker makes adding such effects incredibly easy, and the results look awesomely assured and professional.

To see the catalog of these fancy transitions, click Tools Transitions (or click the Transitions link in the Tasks pane). The available transitionsabout 60 of themappear in the Transitions pane, shown in Figure 15-4. You can double-click any of these icons to see what the transition looks like. To use one in your movie, drag its icon down between two clips in either the Storyboard or the Timeline window. (Its easier to drag transition icons when you're in the Storyboard view, because you have such a big target, the big square between the clips, shown in Figure 15-3.)

Figure 15-4. Click the +/- button shown here to expand the Video track so it reveals the special Transition track. Any transitions you've added show up here as horizontal blocks, making it easy to adjust their durations (drag the endpoints) or delete them (press the Delete key). You can change the standard transition duration by choosing Tools Options Advanced tab .



Tip: Most transitions make your movie shorter. To superimpose the ends of two adjacent clips, Movie Maker is forced to slide the right-hand clip to the left, making the overall movie end sooner.Having your overall project shortened is a serious problem, especially when you've been synchronizing your footage to an existing music track. Having these transitions slide all of your clips to the left can result in chaos, throwing off the synchronization work you've done.Sometimes you can get around this problem by adding the music after the video editing is complete.

15.2.5. Phase 5: Add Video Effects

A video effect is a special effect: a color filter, frame rotation, slow motion, artificial zooms (in or out), and so on. As with transitions, using them with abandon risks making your movie look junky and sophomoricbut every now and then, a special effect may be just what you need for videographic impact.

To view your choices, choose Tools Effects (or click Effects in the Tasks pane). You preview, apply, edit, and delete them exactly as you do transitions (Figure 15-4). For example, you drag an effect square just to the left of the clip that you want to affectbut it affects the entire clip.

If you really intend to go to town with effects on a certain clip, right-click it in either the Storyboard or the Timeline window, then choose Effects from the shortcut menu. The Add or Remove Effects dialog box appears. If you promise to use good taste, you can even pile up multiple effects on a single clip and rearrange the order in which they're applied.

15.2.6. Phase 6: Add Titles and Credits

Text superimposed over footage is incredibly common in the film and video worlds . You'd be hard-pressed to find a single movie, TV show, or commercial that doesn't have titles, captions, or credits. In fact, it's the absence of superimposed text that pegs most camcorder videos as amateur efforts.

To add this kind of text in Movie Maker, begin by choosing Tools Titles and Credits (or click "Titles and Credits in the Tasks pane).

As shown in Figure 15-5, you're offered four places to put text: at the beginning of the movie, at the end of the movie, before a clip, or on a clip.

Figure 15-5. Top: The titles and credits option offers several different placements for titles and a way to enter credits for your video .
Second from top: On the next screen, you're supposed to type up the actual text of the credits .
Third: Here's where you choose an animation style for the text: how will it fly onto the screen? The result can lookwell, if not professional, then at least familiar .
Bottom: Adjust superimposed titles' duration by dragging their end handles in the Title Overlay track .


Once you've clicked your choice, you can type the actual text. This screen also offers "Change the title animation" and "Change the text font and color" links, which affect how the titles or credits drift across the screen (and in what type style). The animation effects duplicate just about every common TV-title style: letters flying onto the screen, spinning onto the screen, scrolling across the screen, and so on.

When you click Add Title, the program switches to Timeline view and adds your text to the film in progress (Figure 15-5, bottom). On the Timeline, text gets its own track; double-click a title block to edit it. You can also drag its ends to change the beginning or ending points.

15.2.7. Phase 7: Add Background Music

If you're lucky, you may someday get a chance to watch a movie whose soundtrack isn't finished yet. At that moment, your understanding of the film medium will take an enormous leap forward. "Jeez," you'll say, "without music and sound effects, this $200 million Hollywood film has no more emotional impact than...my home movies!"

And you'll be right. Without music, sound effects, and sound editing, even the best Hollywood movie will leave you cold and unimpressed. Fortunately, Movie Maker can use any MP3 or WMA file on your hard drive as a musical soundtrack. Just click Import Media on the Movie Maker toolbar. The music file appears among your clips with a special musical-note icon.

Now, in Timeline view, drag the music clip onto the track marked Audio/Music. You can drag the appropriate rectangular strip left or right to control where it starts and ends; adjust the audio's volume by right-clicking it and choosing Volume from the shortcut menu.

GEM IN THE ROUGH
AutoMovie

AutoMovie might sound like a synonym for "drive-in theater," but it really means "automatically assembled movie." This feature purports to do all of the editing for you. You just show it which clips or clip collections you want assembled , and the program does the rest.

"The rest," in this case, primarily consists of adding transitions and a few video effects between the clips. Don't expect the software to add a narrative arc and develop characters .

To use AutoMovie, click AutoMovie on the toolbar. A box appears, listing several canned style choices: Flip and Slide, Highlights Movie, Music Video, Old Movie, and so onand links that let you insert a title or choose a soundtrack.

Unfortunately, there's no way to preview these canned editorial decisions. You have no choice but to click "Create AutoMovie," take a look at the result, and then choose Edit Undo AutoMovie if youd like to try a different variation.

The truth is, you probably won't use AutoMovie very often. Video editing is an art, and letting a computer do the editing usually isn't any more successful than letting a computer write your term paper for you. But it sure looks good at trade show demos.


Unfortunately, you can't create variations along the music's length (to make it softer when someone's talking, for example); you can, however, use the Tools Audio Levels command to adjust its overall volume relative to the camcorder sound.


Tip: Even if you don't own a camcorder, one of the nicest things you can do with Movie Maker is produce a slide show with sound. After importing still images as described earlier, import a pop song to lay underneath it. You'll be surprised at how much impact the result has.

15.2.8. Phase 8: Save the Movie

When your flick looks and sounds good, you can save it as a standalone file on your hard drive, which you can then double-click to play, or send to potential investors.

To save the file, click a link in the "Publish to" section of the task pane (or choose File Publish Movie, or press Ctrl+P). You have five options:

  • This computer . Choose this option if you want to preserve the complete movie as a file on your hard drive. You can choose from several different compression formats and frame proportions (that is, widescreen vs. standard).


    Tip: If you have the Home Premium or Ultimate edition of Vista, you'll even see three high-definition export options here: Windows Media HD (in 720p or 1080p format) and Windows Media HD for XBox 360. If your source material was also HD video, these formats preserve all of the high-def quality. Note that the resulting files are huge, and generally play back only on high-end PCs.
  • DVD . If you do, in fact, have DVD Maker on your PC (this means you, owners of the Home Premium or Ultimate editions of Vista), clicking this link saves and closes your Movie Maker file and hands the whole thing off to DVD Maker so you can design your menus . (DVD Maker is described later in this chapter.)

  • Recordable CD . A wizard appears to walk you through the process of saving a lower-resolution movie onto a blank CD, so you can distribute it to friends for playback on their PCs. (These disks will also play back on CD and DVD players that bear Microsoft's "HighMAT" logoof which there are very few.)

    GEM IN THE ROUGH
    The Narrator Speaks

    If your PC has a microphone, you can narrate your own "voice-over" soundtrack as the video playsa great way to create a reminiscence or identify the scene. Unfortunately, you can't add both music and narration; Movie Maker can tolerate only one added audio track.

    In Timeline view, choose Tools Narrate Timeline; the Narrate Timeline pane appears. Drag the playback indicator to an empty point on the Audio/Music track and then click the Start Narration button. You can watch the video play as you speak into your microphone.

    Click Stop Narration to wrap it up. You're asked to name and save your narration file (it gets a .wma filename extension). At this point, you can adjust the volume or starting/ending points of the narration track just as you would a music track: by adjusting its bar in the Audio/Music track.


  • E-mail . Video really isn't a good match for email distribution; video files are huge and slow to download. This wizard, therefore, guides you through making a very low-quality, small-framed, slightly jittery movie whose file size is small enough to transmit via the Internet.

  • Digital video camera . If you don't have a DVD burner and DVD Maker, this is by far the most useful "publish" option. It's the only version that preserves every shred of crisp, clear, smooth-motioned video that was in the original footage. (All other options wind up compressing the video, making it jerkier, smaller-framed, and lower quality.)


Tip: You can turn any individual frame from your movie into a still picture (a JPEG file). In the Preview pane, watch the footage until you see the frame you want to capture, and then choose Tools Take Picture from Preview. Windows asks you to name your newly created graphics file and save it, and then imports the still photo into the Movie Maker project.


Windows Vista. The Missing Manual
Windows Vista: The Missing Manual
ISBN: 0596528272
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 284
Authors: David Pogue

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