Using the
Picture
Like most video projects I do, I make the parts of it as
separate modules... for this one, it's a photo story, a custom title overlay,
the animated water clips, and then the final assembly in Movie Maker.
The Photo Story...
For the panning and zooming of a large image such as
this, Photo Story 3 is the tool.
I resized the original from its 2500 x 1656 pixels to a JPG file
of 1500 x1875 pixels to align it exactly with the standard 4:3 aspect ratio of
stories and movies. I opted for a little distortion rather than cropping
something from the picture.
The story clip was made with 5 copies of the same picture. All I
did for each was...
-
pick the points to pan and zoom from and to
-
set the starting point of each to be the same as the ending
point of the previous picture
-
uncheck the default of starting each picture
with a transition... this is needed for seamless changes in direction as the
story plays
I saved the story to a 640x480 size to align with the movie file
I was heading toward.
The Custom Title Overlay... and
the Water Animation
To animate the water, I used Paint.net. With the magic wand,
eraser and rectangular selection tools, it was a quick job to remove the pixels
from the water and fireboat hose sprays.
Here's a cropped portion of the saved .png
file... the transparent areas appear black now, but are see-though when
used as an image overlay in Movie Maker.
To animate the water, I went to my stock of video footage and
looked at beach scenes of Saugatuck, and some water fountain shots in
Chicago. I put clips on the timeline and applied the overlay, trimmed the
video clips and slowed the speed of the ripples and waves by applying the
Slow Down-Half effect as needed.
When the animation looked OK, I saved the clip to a DV-AVI file.
There were a number of rendering passes to make the overall intro clip. I used
DV-AVI for each of the interim steps to maintain visual quality.
The Assembly in Movie Maker...
This is where it all comes together. Going down the
project tracks, here's what I did...
The first two video clips were
from the renderings to get the animated water scene, and
mixing it with the photo story. During the assembly I split it on
the timeline at about the 10 second point... to apply some zooming
out effects from Pixelan to the first part of the clip...
ending it at full screen. It stayed full screen until the photo
story started its zooming and panning.
The snowflakes effect was added to each of the video
clips. It was a Christmas parade and the snowflakes across all clips
help visually integrate them.
The parade clips got the Pixelan Crop All 2% effect... to get
rid of flaky 7 lines of pixels at the bottom of the clips. The camcorder
was a Hi8 and the bottom of all my footage when imported to DV
shows bottom artifacts. The 2% effect zooms in just enough to
move them out of the way.
The transitions are simple overlapping
fades.
The audio associated with the video is silent
until the parade clips begin.
The audio/music track starts with a copy of
the fire engine clip from the parade, significantly lowered in volume.
The 2nd clip is another copy of the same but with slightly higher volume as
the zooming toward the city begins. The 3rd clip is normal volume. In all I
was ramping the sound of the fire engine and parade up as the visual moved
more and more toward the city streets.
The title overlays are the words you see in
the sample clip, added just for the newsletter. The custom overlay used to
animate the water had already been folded into the opening clip in an
earlier rendering, so you wouldn't see it in this assembly
step.
My personal parade video would of course be much longer... just
a couple clips to show you how the opening flows into the parade itself.
Conclusion and
Closing... and What's Next?
Being a 'do-it-yourselfer', it's a
rare treat for me to use such a professional picture. I sent
Roy the link to the video to show him how I used it... thinking it would give
him a chance to have any second thoughts about me using it. We're still
good, at least until he reads the newsletter. Thanks again Roy!!!
What's next is the MVP Summit... lots
of mingling, learning and partying.
Have a great couple/few weeks!!
PapaJohn
It was a fun exercise, which I'd like to share it with you...
Making Movies with Vista! is a six page article in
the Spring 2007 Special Edition of
MaximumPC, on
bookstands now to May 29, 2007. 
