Newsletter #107 - June 11, 2006
the 307 Video
Effects
on my Laptop
With the Photo Story 3 tutorial for MaximumPC
completed, I'm back to editing the Renaissance wedding footage and
planning our trip to Europe.
The wedding videos can use a sprinkling of video effects and
transitions, and I've got so many to pick from on my laptop that decided
to use this issue as a good excuse to catalog them a bit
better...
My HP laptop currently has 307 video effects on it. As you can
mix and match as many as 6 effects on each clip, that gives me over 837
trillion possible combinations for each clip in a project. Per my
calculator, there are
837,201,991,720,249 possibilities
If that's not enough, I can always make another custom one, using
an xml file. This digital world of video editing is truly amazing.
Weighing in at about 1-1/2 MB in file size, this wins the prize for
the largest newsletter... but it probably also wins an award for the fewest
words. I just wanted a good visual catalog to scan when I'm thinking about
special effects.
... before getting into it
further, a few
short notes...
Notes...
Vista Corner... I get an error message when
I try to preview a Photo Story 3 project on it. Other than that it works OK
making and rendering stories, and playing them in WMP.
Another follow-up note about my first
for-sale video on Google
Video... submitted on May 3... the current status is still "Video
is verified; stay tuned - it will be live shortly"... that's over a month
now, and still waiting.
I
can use any and all suggestions about Istanbul... anyone
familiar with the Sarnic
Hotel where we have reservations? Will I be able to
video inside museums, the Blue Mosque, Topkapi Palace, etc...
I
thought the Maximum PC tutorial was done.... but I got a
last minute request to give them the story to include in the disc going out
with the magazine. As a real story wasn't part of the agreement, I didn't have
anything more than what was needed to take screen shots for the
pictures. Of course I whipped one up.
.... back to the main
topic...
Video Effects on my
Laptop
Let's start by going backwards.... to
get from my 307 effects to the 28 that came with the basic version of Movie
Maker 2. If you know the right folder to toggle, turning the extras off and
on is easy.
When I write books or magazine
articles, I often need to turn things off to be able to get screen shots of
selected items. We can do it in 3 steps.
Step 1 - Rename the
AddOnTFX folder for MM2, the folder typically used by those
providing extra effects packages, and those using custom xml files. I did
it by adding 'removed' to the end of the 
folder name.
If you do it with Movie Maker open, you
won't see a change as all the info in the folder goes into your system's
memory as Movie Maker starts up... but, by opening MM2 after doing it, it'll
skip over this renamed folded.
The 307 effects I started with went down to
58 with this one rename, but still 30 more than the starter pack of 28
MM2 video effects.
Step 2 - 
Rename the AddOnTFX folder for MM1... the
first Adorage package for Movie Maker 2 uses
that folder for its 16 effects. By renaming it the same way, the number of
installed effects went down to 42.
The two new Adorage packages use the MM2
AddOnTFX folder, so they were already moved aside by step 1.
Step 3 - Rename the
MUI\0409\AddOnTFX folder... which has a DLL and 
XML file for 14 pan/zoom
effects on my laptop because it's a Media Center Edition system.
That gets my laptop down to the
core set of 28 that's on all versions of MM2. I'll skip over those 28,
as I've covered them in the Zero to Hero and Do Amazing Things books... and
you're more than familiar with them.
With the slate clean, I'll bring the packages
back into MM2 one at a time to see which of the effects belongs to which package
or file, and take pictures of them for the
newsletter.
The 14 pan/zoom effects on MCE
systems...
It's a handy set that I use a lot... mostly for
cropping the area of interest in a clip to move something not wanted in the
scene out of the way, without having to take the source file
to VirtualDub for cropping.
The
first
Adorage Movie Maker 2 Package... contains 16
effects, 11 of which are frames or windows of some
sort. A few... the Magnifier, Streamer and The End are dynamic in that
movement is applied.
249 of the effects are toggled off and on by
renaming the main AddOnTFX folder under Movie Maker... that folder has 51 xml files, each of which having one
or more effects, transitions or title overlays.
I've explored different ways of managing this
library. For this newsletter, I created another folder named AddOnTFX
Library at the same level as the AddOnTFX... and moved the 51 xml files to
it. That results in Movie Maker not finding them at startup... and I can copy
them from the library one at a time to see what shows up in Movie Maker when I
do.
I left all the DLL and other files in the
folder. Without the xml files that call on them, they aren't involved.
Let's run down them in alphabetical order. I'll
include links to the websites for each...
Custom xml files go in this folder too.
As the xml files can be
for transitions or title overlays also, I'll spay paint those in the file list that are not for
video effects.
For the xml files that are for effects, I'll
copy them into the AddOnTFX folder one at a time, and take snapshots. Some
are pretty well represented by their thumbnails. Others are better seen
by new snapshots of what the effects look like on the sample file that
comes with Movie Maker.
The Adorage #3 one was covered above. Let's go
down the rest of them in alphabetical order...
The FunPackFx.xml
has the snowflakes effect...
HitTheBongo does
as professional a job on special effects as anyone. Here's his Symbol Set
1.
Two of the Persian Gal's xml
files are for effects... they are made by going to the Editing
Movies > XML - Persian section of my website and copying the xml
code.
One of them is a
Picture-in-Picture effect with the clip that it's applied to being 1/4
size in the upper right.
The other says it's Whatever You
Like... it takes your transparent Logo.png file and overlays it on
the clip.
Rehan's PIP+ package
includes 8 dynamic effects and an overlay flower wreath. The 4 pan/zoom
ones have too much action for me to show them any better than his
thumbnails.
Pixelan has a
number of packages for Movie Maker 2... I have 9 of them on my laptop with video
effects. Here's the visual listing of what's in them.
Bonus Filter
Pack
Bonus
Pack
Contrast
Pack
Filter New
Pack
Filter
Pack
Frame
Pack
Pan Zoom New
Pack
Pan Zoom
Pack
Plus
TransFX
Conclusions and Closing
The forums at WindowsMovieMakers.net have lots of custom xml
code being passed around... there's no conclusion or closing, new ones keep
being developed and shared. There isn't a centralized complete library of the
custom developed ones.
Next week's issue will be similar but about the video
transitions on my laptop.
Have a great week...
PapaJohn
