Transition Maker 2 Tutorial - Section 3 Understanding Projects and Transitions
With your knowledge of Movie Maker 2, you already understand transitions. So you just need to learn about how you make them using Transition Maker 2.
And you know about projects in Movie Maker 2, a project being a movie in development.
A project in TM2 is a set of custom made transitions. Each set can have as few as one transition and as many as 32. And you can have as many projects or sets as you want.
This section of the tutorial provides an overview of two TM2 main features, the Project Editor and the Transition Editors. The transitions you make with TM2 utilize the gradient feature of MM2, so think of transitions and gradients as being the same thing when working in TM2.
Tutorial Sections • 1 - Download TM2 • 2 - Install, Register and Review the Main Menu
• 3 - Understanding TM2 Projects and Transitions • 4 - Create Your Transitions
• 5 - Package your transitions into Projects • 6 - Publish your Projects to Movie Maker 2 • 7 - Use Your transitions in Movie Maker 2
3 - Understanding Projects and Transitions in TM2
A • Create a new project, or open an existing one, with the Create/Open Project button of the main menu.
Like many Windows software packages, TM2 provides a number of different ways to do the same thing... opening a project is one of them. You can do it from the Create/Open Project Button, the Open Project Editor button, or from within the menus of the Transition and Project Editors.
Similar to Movie Maker, you can only have one project open at a time...
When you create a new project, a new folder is automatically created under the main TM2 one, and three files are placed in it. The 3 files are a DLL for the set of thumbnails, an XML file with instructions for Movie Maker 2 to use when using a selected transition, and a TXT file... which is a special TM2 file, not to be modified.
You don't need to know anything technical.... all you need to understand is that, when you want to work on making transitions with the Transition Editor, or package them into a set with the Project Editor, you should first open the project that you'll be working on.
Let's take a brief look at the Project and Transition Editors.
TM2 Project Editor
B • The screen shot below is the Project Editor with a full project of 32 transitions. The project is one of the samples included with TM2.
The thumbnails along the top are the same ones you'll see when you use your transitions in Movie Maker 2.
Each line or row of the table defines a transition... TM2 will fill in almost all of the information. Your job is to simply point the project editor to the transitions you want to include in the project, and pick a background color for the set of thumbnails.
TM2 will make all of the necessary files for the project... whenever you want to use them in MM2, you 'publish' the project from TM2. That copies the transitions from the project to Movie Maker 2.
C • When you 'Publish' a TM2 project, TM2 creates a subfolder under Movie Maker 2, and copies all of the needed files to it.... just select the project to publish.
D • You 'Unpublish' a set the same way. TM2 checks the projects currently with Movie Maker and includes them in a picklist. Select the one you want to remove and TM2 will delete the Movie Maker 2 files and subfolder. Unpublishing won't delete the project files and folder under TM2, so you could turn around right after 'Unpublishing' a project and 'Publish' it again.
TM2 Transition Editors
E • The screen shot below shows the opening view of the Transition Editor Window. TM2 provides 4 styles of gradiant editors to choose from, and a 5th option for you to define your own. Here it is in the TM2 Classic option, something called the scan converter. We'll go into each in the next section of the tutorial.
To make a transition, you'll use any still image. It might be a piece of clip art, something you made in Paint or other graphics editing software, a photo from your digital camera, or a snapshot of a video clip made by MM2's snapshot feature.
F • Open the still picture in the transition editor, play with various settings to get the transition to the point you like it... you don't need to know what's happening technically, just experience it and know what you like. As you tweak the settings you'll see a preview. When you see one you like, you can save it.
Using the various settings to make a transition is highly interactive and experiential, just as editing a movie project is in MM2.
G • Saving a transition in your TM2 Project means saving a new grayscale .jpg or .png image... it's that new image that will be used by Movie Maker to do the transition, one made from your starting image.
