Create Your Story's Audio Track in Movie
Maker
One of
the goals of my website is to use the synergy
between Photo Story and Movie Maker to do amazing things, doing
more with both than you can do with either one by itself. This newsletter is an
example of that... using a 3-step process to create the audio track of a
story:
1 - Create the visual track
for a story in Photo Story 32 - Take the visual into Movie Maker and create the
audio track for it
3 - Back in Photo Story 3, render the
visual and audio together into the
final storyI'll use camcorder footage and camera pictures from the medieval
festival we went to in the spring. Bernadette was taking pictures with our
5 megapixel camera, and I was taking video, as usual. I'll use the high
quality pictures to make the video track, and the audio from the
camcorder footage.
Here's the link to the sample
story I made for this newsletter. It plays for almost 5
minutes and has a number of different topical segments... each marked by a
lead-in title picture and with different and appropriate audio. The audio,
being mixed in Movie Maker, flows across
the transitions between scenes in a way that you can't achieve in
Photo Story 3.
With just a couple exceptions I used the default motion settings of Photo
Story 3. I didn't use any special transitions, and didn't take great care to fix
the audio issues such as wind noise. It's more of a rough draft than a polished
video, simply to illustrate the subject of
this newsletter.
... before getting
into the tutorial, here
are a few notes...
Notes...
The president of
neptune sent a positive note about last week's newsletter about
neptune and mydeo... no comment yet from
mydeo.
I bought a polarizing filter for my
camcorder this week... on a trip to Chicago last weekend, we passed by the
Tribune building, where the WGN radio was being broadcast live from the studio
room at street level. With it being daytime, the reflections of the street
scenes in the windows prevented me from capturing video through the window. The
polarizing filter should eliminate such reflections.
The MVP Summit meeting at Microsoft is about a month away. One of the
things the MVPs in the digital media area are doing this time is
introducing ourselves at the meetings with a Photo Story instead of the usual
standing up and saying something. We're going to practice what we
preach. Here's a link to my intro
story... it's another one made by doing the visual in
Photo Story 3 and the audio in Movie Maker. For this one, I made the
audio first and then fit the visual to it. The goal was a 30 second
story... note that it's a widescreen story, using the custom widescreen profile
on my website.
My Toshiba laptop is in the
CompUSA repair center in Texas for the 4th time in less than a year... they
tell me it needs a new TV Tuner and DVD/CD combo... both were replaced 3 months
ago and the TV Tuner didn't work since I got the computer back from it's last
visit there. I'm about ready to write a long letter about my ongoing issues with
CompUSA's support.
.... on to the main
topic
create the video track in Photo Story
3
I first sorted the pictures into
sub-folders with topical themes... bawdiness, children,
classes of people, dining, fashion, fighting, horses, housing, love, music,
religion, and singing... moving each picture into the appropriate
topical sub-folder.
Then I looked though each group to
select interesting ones. I didn't resize any,
as Photo Story 3 does such a great job with 5
megapixel pictures.
For the topic of religion, there was only one
picture of the nun, so I took a snapshot in Movie Maker to get a second
one... you can tell which one it is in the story... the only low
quality one with lots of pixilation. A snapshot from a DV-AVI file is 1/3
of a megapixel, 15 times fewer pixels than pictures from our
digicam.
For a background
image for text overlays I went to Paint, set
the canvas size to 640x480 pixels, painted it red, and placed a cropped
section from one of the pictures on it... the text will be added in
Photo Story. I used the same picture for the
opening title and between each topical segment of the story... with
different text on each.
I used my file manager to drag and drop
the pictures into the story in topical groups.
I didn't do much in the way of editing the visual
track of the story. The purpose was to spend any extra time on editing the
audio track in Movie Maker.
At this point, I saved the project, and rendered a
low quality story WMV file. The project file let me go back for more
editing after the audio track was ready. The rendered story was an aid
to working on the audio in Movie Maker.
create the audio track in Movie
Maker
To prepare for the audio project in Movie Maker,
I captured footage of the event from my camcorder tape, imported it
into Movie Maker as a single clip, put it on the audio/music track of the
timeline, and saved it to a high quality audio WMA file. That was to get an
audio-only file. I could have gotten a WAV file instead by ripping it from the
file using TMPGEnc... either one - WMA or WAV - works well.
I imported the audio file and split it into
segments in the collection. From there it was a matter of dragging the
clips to the timeline and working them there so they worked well with the
visual...
Here's what the timeline looked like when I
finished the arrangement... with a few notes about it:
...
a few
things about the Movie Maker project:
The audio needs to
finish a bit after the video or Photo Story 3 won't play
the sound during the last picture in the film strip. We had learned that
in an earlier newsletter.
The picture at the right shows the timeline
zoomed all the way in to better see where the tracks end.
The audio (the track with the wave patterns) continues beyond
the video, just a bit... less than a second... use a quiet or muted clip
there if you don't want to hear audio after the video finishes... but have
some extra frames of audio.
I split the video
track into the 6 topical segments on the
timeline... as a job aid to more easily see the
topical break points during the audio editing. I didn't need to do it. Be
careful not to instinctively add any transitions that can change the overall
duration of the story. Any transitions need to be done in Photo
Story.
Again for some visual feedback
during editing, I added titles... one for each
segment. They aren't needed when looking at the zoomed out view above,
but when fully zoomed into the timeline and in the middle of a segment, the
title with the name of the segment is handy as a reference
point.When the audio editing is finished and ready
to render... strip away the video and text overlay tracks so the
rendering will be to an audio-only WMA file.
To strip the tracks, my usual is to select a
clip on the video track, use the Control-A keys to expand the selection to
include all of the clips on that track... and press the Delete key. Do
it again on the title overlay track, and you're left
with only the audio/music, arranged and positioned as you want
it.
Here's the timeline just before
rendering a high quality WMA audio file for
the story.
With the new WMA audio file, we're ready to take it
to the story project.
combine the video and audio in Photo Story 3
Reopen the Photo Story 3 project. It already has the
video track, so all you need to do is go to the Add Background
Music window and select the WMA audio file
(Select Music...), with the first picture of the film
strip selected so the audio plays throughout the story.
We never had to do any calculations about the story's
duration... by saving the story and using it in Movie Maker, we only
needed to check that the last audio clip ends a little past the
end of the video clip. We didn't have to know how long the overall
story plays.
You're ready to render the final story to a high
quality file for viewing and distribution... for online viewing I picked a
640x480 size.
Conclusions and Closing
Almost all of the Photo Stories
I see have background music... and some have a little narration. I haven't seen
any with an audio track that uses various sources such as camcorder
tapes. Even if you want music from your CDs, mixing it with some personal audio
clips would add a lot to a story.
In addition to the audio that is
automatically recorded with the visual scenes, I often use the camcorder
simply as an audio recorder... sometimes not
even removing the lens cap. I collect audio clips as I do
video.
It's much easier to find some
good audio from my library of camcorder tapes than it is
to search the internet for royalty free files... and the audio is
much more personal.
Have a great week...
PapaJohn