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Download and Install

Movica Download

The download is free, an open source project from Source Forge. The installation file is a small 1-1/2 MB SetupMovica_Beta6_6.msi file... download, install and open it. The working window has 5 tabs. For now we'll go to the 'Join' one to combine a couple WMV files into one.

We'll go to the other tabs later. To join a couple stories, go to the Join tab, use the open files icon and select those you want to join. I put copies of the files to join into the Movica folder and renamed them 1.wmv and 2.wmv. Don't worry about the sequence of opening as you can move the items in the list up or down to change them.

It sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. Play the output file completely before assuming it's good. The app's help file says 'a success message on the results window is an unreliable measure'. I agree fully.

Here's my first successfully joined video made from two PS3 files.

I'll list the issues I've run into when combining stories, and what... if anything... I've done about them. Then I'll focus more on the successed and what can be done with the help of Movica.

Problems and Reasons

• You don't get the 'Success!' note... your input files are not close enough in audio and/or video properties, even if you made them both with the same Photo Story 3 profile. I had a long string of these failures when first checking Movica.

  Here's a typical failure message... trying to combine 3 stories, each saved with the same profile.

  

• It says success but playing the output story in Windows Media Player shows the 2nd input file is playing only as blackness while you can hear its audio. Changing the sequence results in the same thing... whichever story is first is seen. If you combine 3 stories, with the first and third ones being copies of the same, you can see both but still not the 2nd one.

• The output file plays fine in Windows Media Player, but the feedback about the duration of the video is too small... like a 4 minute video is indicated as an 8 second one.

• PS3 project files 'adjusted' with the utility TweakPS produce wmv files that are problems in the combined file. I don't know why, but I've decided to minimize the use of tweaked files. My sample on vimeo uses a tweaked file as the opening clip, something I had hoped to do lots of... but I won't until I understand more about the issues.

Success and Additional Info

You should use the same profile to save each of the stories for the combined file.

The video stream of a story file has to be VBR for the compression codec to work, but the audio can be CBR or VBR... I changed my custom profile to CBR, thinking it would make wmv files more consistent with each other. Testing so far shows the audio bitrate of a story goes up as the quality setting in the profile goes up. I've also seen that a batch of pictures with durations less than 1-1/2 seconds result in the audio bitrate going up. The highest audio bitrate I've seen in a story is when I've used TweakPS to make the pictures .03 seconds in duration. There's a relationship between picture duration and audio bitrate.

Mixing stories that use different types of audio files doesn't seem to cause issues... I've combined those that use MP3, WMA, WAV and music auto-generated by Photo Story 3, and don't see any reason to use the same audio file types in each of the stories used for the combination.