Newsletter #189
Gloodle
I downloaded Gloodle about a year ago, and liked
playing with it... but as with so many things, I hadn't gone back. A
recent post on the windowsmoviemakers.net forum reminded, and an email from
Blaine suggesting I do a newsletter about it drove it home. Good
idea! I like video doodling and Gloodle fits right in.
It hasn't changed since over the year... in fact it hasn't been
revised in 10 years, an oldie but goodie. Here's the link to the
wondertouch website where it's a free download.
The website says... in Gloodle you just
draw on the window and cool things happen. Not much thinking required. All
software should be that easy.
For this week's demo, I made a 45 second clip in Movie Maker,
using two input clips from Gloodle...
Click this image to view it... easier to understand by watching
rather than reading.
I made the clips using XP, but Gloodle works just as well
on Vista.
In this newsletter I'll take you through the steps of this
Gloodle and Movie Maker project... before going into details,
here's...
a couple notes...
After last week's newsletter about countdown clock project
templates for
Photo Story 3, I made another
template using a 'checkerboard-like' style...
The downloadable project file
is on the website on the Photo Story 3 > Do Amazing Things page.
I'm in the middle
of another software review for Bright Hub...
something right up my ally, a video editing/disc making software suite...
For vimeo website hosting service
fans, I noticed in their FAQs that a high-def uploaded video is first
produced in 'draft' quality, so you can see it soon. Then as time permits,
the file is converted to full HD quality to replace the draft. I put two of
them up last night, just to test the process, and I'm
still waiting for the HD quality ones to kick in.
... back to the main
subject
Making the
'Gloodled' Sample Clip
A forum poster asked how to make clips
of marked maps like they do in Indiana Jones movies. One of the
responses pointed to Gloodle. For this week's sample, I dug out my vintage 1999
Hi8 video clips from a visit to the MGM Studios attraction in
Disney World.
The steps to make this sample involve a
number of software apps from my toolbox, as usual.
Some thinking before jumping in...
-
the video clip was shot in standard 4:3 mode,
and being captured from a mini-DV camcorder as DV-AVI at 720x480
pixels
-
what's great about Gloodle is a feature to
save your graphical doodling as an AVI file. The compression options in
Gloodle included the Panasonic DV codec (on systems that have it
installed), which needs inputs of 720x480 pixels. That fixed the
size of my working canvas in Gloodle.
You get the picture!!! I needed to work in
Gloodle using 720x480 pixels... yet the final saved clip will be a WMV file
at 640x480 pixels. Square pixels on the computer and rectangular ones in the
DV-AVI files. To do that, I'll distort still pictures as needed to
keep things in sync.
The seven working steps are...
Step 1 - get a video clip to
Gloodle
My vintage 1999 videos were shot on a Hi8 camcorder, and copied to
mini-DV tapes. I remembered having a couple minutes of video footage, so I
searched my database for the word 'Indiana' and saw it started 9
minutes into mini-DV tape #19A.
A few minutes later, the captured DV-AVI
clip was in Movie Maker.
Step 2 - get a picture of a map
I reached into my library of old maps... pages cut from an
1875 encyclopedia... and scanned part of northern Africa. That seems
like a place Indiana Jones would go.
Step 3 - open Gloodle and load the background
image
From the larger scanned image, I used IrfanView to crop a
640x480 pixel area, something across the desert that made for a nice
and easy path marking place.
The 640x480 size is 4:3 aspect ratio... but to put it into a
DV-AVI file, I want it at 720x480, so IrfanView is used to resize/distort
it before loading it into Gloodle.
Here's the slightly distorted image in Gloodle as the
background image.
Step 4 - Annotate the map with a marked trail
That's done by drawing lines as a series of globs.
Pick a glob shape and whatever line drawing settings you want.
Notice the little Drawing History window... it puts a marker
on its timeline each time you stop pause your marking.
You can use the slider to go back and forth in the
history of your path globbing line drawing.
Step 5 - Create a movie
of your path marking...
This is the first of two AVI files for the
project, the other one being the transition clip with the swarm
of globs.
After selecting a folder and providing a file name,
tell it the number of frames you want. At 30 frames per second for a DV-AVI
file, 300 frames gets you a 10 second clip.
You can speed it up or slow it down as needed
with a Movie Maker effect. Don't spend too much time doing the
math.
As mentioned before, compression options
include the Panasonic DV Codec.
The rendering of such a short clip is quick.
The animated path file is ready to use in the Movie Maker
project.
Step 6 - Make a transitioning clip
While I was in Gloodle, I looked to see what else
it could do of interest to a movie or story project... and decided to make a
custom transition to go from the marked path of the opening clip to
the first frame of the Indiana Jones main feature.
I took a snapshot of the opening frame of
the video clip, using Movie Maker, taking the snapshot in the
collection for highest quality. From a 720x480 DV-AVI clip, the frame snapshot
is a 640x480 JPG file.
To align the snapshot with the Gloodle canvas and
DV-AVI clip size, I resized the frame using IrfanView to make
it 720x480 pixels before importing into Gloodle.
The settings I opted for when importing the
image into Gloodle included...
-
using the colors from the imported image
-
applying globs from the darkest parts of the
image to the brightest
-
using the most number of
globs
The snapshot below shows the globs coming in as
the import happens. You'll see them in the sample clip.
The saved movie clip will show the globs
without the image settings window...
It'll be just right to use on the
timeline of the movie project, between the animated path clip and the start of
the Indiana Jones video.
Step 7... make the movie
project
This part is familiar and easy, the project
timeline in MM2.1.
I used the standard slow down and speed up effects
on the clips from Gloodle... flavoring the animation speeds to
taste.
I used a copy of the frame grab from MM2.1 between
the Goodle clip and the beginning of the Indiana Jones clip.... so I could apply
a fade into the still picture from the globs. This picture is the
640x480 sized one made by Movie Maker, not the 720x480 used in Gloodle for
the DV-AVI file.
The Indiana Jones clip starts a bit after the
beginning of the full clip from the camcorder. For audio during the
first 20 seconds (Gloodle doesn't do audio), I used the sound from the part of
the clip I didn't use for the visual. The
clip on the Audio/Music track is part of the DV-AVI file, dragged down
to the audio track.
The final touch was to add a title.
Conclusion and Closing... and What's
Next?
I Gloodled some more in the days after making the sample, but
didn't find anything else that struck a chord with movie project...
What came the closest to the map trails and custom transitions
was using a plain blue canvas in Gloodle, and using the bluescreen
transition to overlay the animations on video clips, something you can't do with
Gloodle. To do that you need some great looking Gloodles... something I
don't have yet.
Have a great week....
PapaJohn
