Movie Lovers

Some of us are a lot more than movie lovers. We are movie maniacs! The reason why there are home theatre systems available that cost as much as a car (and some as much as a small bungalow), is because there are some people with enough money and passion for movies and audio to buy such systems.

When it comes to personal entertainment, nothing beats a great 5.1 home theatre system with a wide flat screen plasma display. It’s like being at the movies; but without the irritating cell phones ringing, talkative people, lines, dirty seats and bad food. The fact that you have a pause button for when the phone rings or nature calls is like icing on the cake!

Enough! There’s no need to beat this dead horse, we all know how great home theatres can be. We all want one! However, are there any available that suit our needs, or more importantly, our pockets?

Playing Director

Not all the fun of digital video lies in watching! After all, as the cameras in phones get better, and the market penetration of digital cameras soar, people are fast becoming directors in their own little movie worlds!

So whether it’s making a video CD out of your still photographs, or editing a home-movie that you shot yourself, a digital camera, a PC and a CD-writer is all you need to make your own movie and send it to your friends and family!

A large population run Windows XP on their systems, and as a result, have Windows Movie Maker pre-installed. Unfortunately, most of us don’t realise the power that this little “free” software has. Let’s learn more about Movie Maker:

The first step is to get the latest version of Microsoft’s Windows Movie Maker from the windows update site. Visit http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=3646727 to update your Windows installation and get the latest version of Movie Maker. If you have a decent Internet connection and have Automatic Updates enabled on Windows XP, you probably will not need to update your version of Movie Maker.

Before you begin shooting or editing your movie, you need to make sure you have a decent system, capable of editing video. The minimum recommended system configuration is as follows:

- 1.5 GHz CPU
- Windows XP + SP2
- 256 MB RAM
- 64 MB video memory with 3D graphics acceleration
- Support for DirectX 9
- 4 GB free hard disk space
- CD-Writer or DVD-Writer drive
- Sound card + speakers or headphones
- Internet connection

If your system is underpowered, the editing will still work, but please don’t blame us for the sudden loss of hair or fingernails, brought on by irritatingly long waits and software crashes!

Your graphics card also needs to have an analogue input port (such as an S-Video port, or composite video) if your camera has only an analogue output. For most digital cameras, a FireWire (IEEE 1394) port should suffice. If you plan to use a Webcam, the standard USB connector will do as well.

Of course, all the above is necessary if you are planning on shooting the movie live. If you have already shot the video and have transferred it to your computer, all you have to do is import the movies into Movie Maker from their location on your hard disk and begin splicing them together!

Now that you’re all set to make your movie, your first hurdle is where to begin. As with any professional movie, what you need is a storyboard!

Storyboards

Storyboards are nothing but plans and blueprints of anything. We say anything because you can create a storyboard for a movie, a play, a presentation and even an article-yes we writers do it all the time as well!

The first step when building a storyboard is to import your movies into Movie Maker. When you start Movie Maker, you’ll see a column on the extreme left that is called ‘Movie Tasks’. Here you see 3 basic steps: “1. Capture Video”, “2. Edit Movie”, “3. Finish Movie”.

Under ‘Capture Video’, step you will see the “Import Video” link. Click on it and you can choose video files from anywhere on your hard drive. You can also choose to import still images here. Once the video and image files are imported to the collection, you will see thumbnails of them in the middle column. If you select a file, on the right you will see how it appears in Windows Media Player.

Now you can start dragging and dropping files from the Collection view to the storyboard at the bottom. You can press [Ctrl] + [W] to view the movie as it stands currently.

Editing

In the bottom pane you should see a ‘Show Timeline’ button. Click on it. You will see the length of each movie clip. Move the blue slider to a position in a clip where you want to cut it, and then drag the edge of the clip to that point. This is how you edit clips to shorten them.

If you want to break a clip up into two parts, just select it in the Timeline view and copy and paste it (using [Ctrl] + [C] and then [Ctrl] + [V]), and then edit the two clips into smaller parts. Windows Movie Maker automatically breaks large movie clips into smaller parts, so you should be able to edit them all easily, and even delete a few scenes in the middle.

Effects And Transitions

Once your storyboard is ready and you have edited the clips, you can add Video effects and transitions to them. To add effects, just right-click on a clip in either the Timeline or Storyboard view and choose Video Effects.

Here, you should be able to add from a list of effects on the left. If you just want a simple Fade In or Fade Out effect, right-click on a clip and select either Fade In or Fade Out, instead of clicking on ‘Video Effects’.

Transitions are easily achieved from one clip to another, much like it is in Microsoft PowerPoint presentations. Just click on the “Edit Movie” option in the left pane and you should see an option titled “View video transitions”. Click on this to get a list of transitions in the middle pane. Double clicking on a transition will preview it in the Media Player pane on the right. To add a transition, just drag and drop it into the timeline view at the appropriate spot.

You need to remember that effects are applied to a clip and transition applied between clips. So a transition will always occur between clips, and not in the middle of one. If you want a transition to occur in the middle of a clip, you will need to split that clip into two separate clips by using the copy + paste method described earlier.

Titles And Credits

Titles and credits can be used at the beginning and end of your movie. You can also overlay text on a clip so that it appears while the clip plays.

In the left pane, under the Edit Movie option, you should see a “Make titles or credits” link. Click on it and you will see the following options:

Add title at the beginning of the movie:
This will add a title to the beginning of the movie, such as introductory statements.

Add title before the selected clip in the timeline:
You can insert titles between clips using this option

Add title on the selected clip in the timeline:
This will overlay the title on the currently selected clip

Add title after the selected clip in the timeline:
You can insert titles between clips using this option

Add credits at the end of the movie:
This is where you are most likely to give yourself credit for making the movie Select the desired and relevant title, and then click on the “Change the title animation” and “Change the text font and color” to change the setting for the title. You can get loads of animation here, including the classic perspective scroll of text used in the beginning of every Star Wars movie made.

Finally, you should also choose the correct Credits’ animation and font style and colour and then click on ‘Done’.

Saving the Movie

Once you are done with everything, you can save your movie by selecting any one of the following, available under the “Finish Movie” option in the left pane:

- Save to my computer
- Save to CD
- Send in e-mail
- Send to the Web
- Send to DV camera

These options are self explanatory, and the most common choice will be “Save to my computer” anyway. And that’s how you can create decent looking movies using Windows Movie Maker.

Portable Fun

Perhaps the best thing about digital video is the fact that we can store it on portable devices for viewing on the road. Today, the amount of portable devices and gadgets available that can store and playback audio and video is on the rise.

Earlier, we would have to rely on laptops to carry entertainment with us. Though portable audio gadgets have been getting smaller and smaller, video face the problem of requiring a screen for viewing. This puts a limit on the amount that manufacturers can shrink a device, and thus affects portability.

Thankfully, major manufacturers have found a way to offer us just the right mix of portability and viewing comfort, in gadgets such as the iRiver and PDAs.

Yes, even PDAs are capable of storing a full movie or two: the Palm Zire 72 for instance, can store a full 700 MB movie on a 512 MB card, thanks to its Palm Desktop software, which compresses a video by reducing its size to fit the Zire 72’s screen. This obviously makes the file about four times smaller, and makes even this PDA a potential portable movie player.

We say potential, because, unless you have a dual-Athlon FX 57 with two 7800’s in SLi mode, converting a full length DivX movie for transfer to your Palm will have you staring at your screen for a few hours at least! Most other PDAs should also offer such functionality, for those of us crazy enough to wait three hours just to have The Matrix on our PDAs, to show off to friends!

We would recommend that people who need to have digital video entertainment on the move opt for a device that was made for video. Devices are available from most major brands, such as Archos, iRiver, Creative, Samsung, Viewsonic, etc. Even more devices are appearing in grey markets from manufacturers such as Dream’eo, Odd-i, Technova, MSI, etc.

The recent trend of adding more powerful processors and external memory card support to mobile phones means that we can soon expect to see video on demand services available to cell phone subscribers.

Overall, the most exciting leaps forward are being made in the portable device section, whether it’s for digital video or entertainment as a whole