HOW TO Tuesday: Make digital movies the easy way

According to some estimates there are about 60 million
(if not more) of you out there with Digital Video Camcorders, just about all DV cameras have Firewire (IEEE 1394)
output/input and there are hundreds of millions of DV tapes being shipped per year. The bad news is, we know exactly what happens ??? you record a lot of stuff to DV tape and never do anything with it. It's a bit of a hassle to sit and edit for hours when all you want is a 2 minute clip from that birthday party or event. And the truth is, most of the stuff we all shoot is crap since we just aim and record everything. So in this week's HOW TO Tuesday we show you how to make use of that footage to quickly and easily make movies and automatically add a soundtrack.

Getting starting

We're going to begin with a Canon DV Camcorder, a Sony VAIO with XP Home, an IEEE 1394 (Firewire) cable and Windows MovieMaker 2.0 from Microsoft (free).

As we mentioned before, most DV cams have IEEE 1394 (Firewire). Sony calls it iLink, Apple calls it Firewire, most refer to it as IEEE 1394.

What is Movie Maker?
From the site:

Windows Movie Maker 2 makes home movies amazingly fun and easy, letting you create, edit, and share your home movies right on your computer with a few simple drag-and-drop moves. Add special effects, music, and narration. Then share your movie via the Web, e-mail, or CD.

While it's not as full featured as commercial applications or iMovie from Apple, if you have PC it's a good (and free) start. The feature we're going to be using is called "AutoMovie.

Click here to download Windows Movie Maker 2.0. Be sure to read the requirements to make sure you can use Movie Maker.

Getting the Movies in to your Computer
By this time you have likely downloaded and installed Movie Maker, shot some footage of that new puppy or birthday party and you're ready to get the clips in as opposed to sitting on the shelf forever.

Put your DV cam in "Play" mode and rewind the tape to the beginning. We usually plug the camera in to AC power as well. Plug the IEEE 1394 cable in to the Camera as well as the PC.

Usually Windows Movie Maker or Windows will ask if you'd like to capture the video now, if it does click okay- if it does not- Start up Movie Maker. Click the Start button > All Programs > Accessories, and click Windows Movie Maker.

Click the File Menu and select Capture Video.

Choose a name and a location for your video, we usually use the desktop. Then click Next.

On the next dialog you can choose the settings for your video. If you plan to have/share this on a PC, choose "Best Quality Playback for my Computer". If you'd like to watch this on your TV later choose "Digital Device Format" this will allow you to transfer it back to your camera and plug it in. There are other settings, but for now we're only concerned with the AutoMovie feature which we'll get to in just a minute. Click next.

In the Capture Method dialog click "Capture parts of the tape manually" we're only going to capture 5 minutes, so we need not capture the entire tape. It's worth noting that if you ever plan to capture a lot of footage make sure your hard drive is large enough to store all this. Also, click "Preview during capture, that way we can watch it, you will also be able to watch it on your DV cam as it records. Click next.

Before you click start capture, unselect "Create clips" we don't need to do that. Press start capture and record as much footage as you want. When you're finished, press Stop and then press Finish. Your movie is now imported to Movie Maker.

Select a Clip in the contents pane, then click Tools > AutoMovie.

Choose a style, for our example we're going to use "Music Video" which will automatically make quick or slow edits based on the music beats.

Under More options, click "Enter a title for the movie" to make a title.

Click "Select audio or background music" under More options.

You can select an audio or music file from a list of imported songs (if you have some) or you can click browse to import one. We happen to have an audio file so we're going to import that. The cool part about this is, you can import a MP3 and have AutoMovie make the movie for the entire length of the song.

To increase or decrease the audio level of an audio clip on the Audio/Music track, by dragging the slider bar towards Audio/Music or towards Video if you want the video to be louder than the music track.

Click Done, Edit movie and you'll see Movie Maker analyze the Audio and Video then make a new movie out of it.

And that's it, really!

At this point you could make more edits, add things, remove things or you can simply save it. Click File > Save Movie file, the Save Movie Wizard will ask you how and where you'd like to save it, for our example we're going to choose the following:

My Computer, we named ours puppy_movie, save it to our desktop and after clicking next in the Settings dialog choosing "Other Settings: Video for broadband 340 Kbps" which makes our movie easy to email (about 1mb) and the quality is pretty good.

Click next and voila! Once you do this a couple times you'll be able to make quick movies and show them to all your friends and family and they'll think you spend a lot of time on it.

Click here to see our movie. We took a lot of boring footage on training a puppy to do "paw" and made it in to a 30 second music video (special thanks to
Astronaut Wife for the music!).

More?

So if you like the idea of AutoMovie there is another application we've tried out call
Muvee, it's quite cool and offers a lot more styles, edits and options- so check it out too, but like all good things, it's not free.

...And if you're really getting in to this, our favorite book on digital video for folks just getting started is
"Faster Smarter Digital Video" by Jason Dunn.

Got a HOW TO you'd like to see here? Email us: torrone@gmail.com