There’s only one small point of confusion, so let’s clear it up.
When you put a transition next to a pic or vid and set it for, say, 4 seconds, it’s immediately going to dig 4 seconds into the time allotted for the object. So if you had a pic that you wanted to transition into for 4 seconds, then display for 6 seconds, then transition to the next pic for 4 seconds, the pic would have to display for 14 seconds.
The point of confusion arises when you’re clicking on the little ‘up’ arrow in the time duration box and it refuses to go any higher. That’s because there isn’t enough time left in the object for the transition to do its thing. Kick that up and the problem’s solved.
So, basically, get the pics and vids timed out first, then add the transitions, and if a transition would look better a few seconds longer, first add a few seconds to the adjoining objects so the transition will have room to ‘grow’.
Also, you’ll probably want to do some fade-ins and fade-outs to black at some point, so you’ll need a black picture residing somewhere that you can load. Size won’t matter.
The Project File
Video programs can be a little touchy, so general practice is to first use the ‘Save As’ option from the File Menu and save a project file, then back it up with a ‘Save’ (or Ctrl-S) throughout the project.
Conversely, I’m having you turn the every-10-minutes auto-save feature off in Preferences, because you could very well spend over 10 minutes trying something out, decide you don’t like it and want to restore your last project file — except the program just automatically overwrote it 35 seconds ago. So you want to constantly back up the project file, but only when you know everything’s correct up to that point.
Forewarned Is Forearmed Dept
One really poor piece of programming that I’ve seen in a number of big programs (Flash 8, Adobe Premiere, etc) is that VS pops open a little ‘processing’ box while it’s rendering the file and the program can’t be minimized. Yet it obviously can be done; DVD Architect pops open a little box while it’s doing its thing, but clicking on the program’s ‘Minimize’ button works just like normal.
This isn’t as much a problem is you keep your Task Bar visible, but since I’ve got a pretty good idea where mine is after 15 years, I keep it hidden.
There are two ways around the problem:
- If you just want access to the Task Bar and there’s a program or window already open, hit the Alt-Tab combo and it should pop open the last-active program or window. At that point the Task Bar will act normally.
- If you actually want to minimize the program, either hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete or click on the Task Bar with the right mouse button and open Task Manager. Click on the ‘Applications’ tab, highlight the ‘Corel’ entry with the right mouse button and ‘Minimize’.
Video Quirks
There are a handful of quirks that almost all large video programs share:
- Just because it doesn’t list the type of format you’re trying to load doesn’t mean that it won’t accept and render it just fine. If your file isn’t listed, set the load requester to display ‘all files’ and select it. Chances are the program will say something like "Unknown format", but you never can tell.
- Just because it displays your file doesn’t mean it’s actually going to load. Video programs are pretty picky about file specs, and if someone didn’t know what they were doing and used the wrong settings when they made the file, the program won’t view it as an ‘official’ video format and might reject it.
- Just because it loads doesn’t mean it’s going to render. That, you can’t tell until you try.
- Just because it renders doesn’t mean it’s going to look good. Render enough files and you’ll see cases where the render might have lots of frames replaced with light green frames, if not the whole video. The entire video might appear stretched in a funny manner. You might see tons of ‘blotchies’ during darker scenes, where the background breaks up into little blotchy squares. Unless the video is actually corrupt (the green frames), the solution is often just using a different format or codec.
If there’s a problem loading the file, head for the Converting page and get that rascal into shape. If it’ll load into VirtualDub, just do a "load & save" and that should be enough.
Loading The Files
Make sure the timeline box is in the first setting (‘Storybook View’). Right-click inside the timeline and add your files. You can grab them with the mouse and move them to a different order.
To set the display time, double-click on the object to open the options. Click inside the ‘seconds’ part of the little time box and it should start blinking. Click on the little ‘up’ and ‘down’ arrow keys to adjust the time.
Note: With pics, you usually want to leave the aspect ratio alone, just so the pic looks correct, but in certain cases this might put a black border across the top and bottom of the pic and you’d rather have it go all the way to the edges. If so, click on the ‘Keep aspect ratio’ button and set it to ‘Fit to project size’. If the pic looks too skewed, pop the original into a graphics program and crop it so the full-screen size has the correct aspect ratio.
Transitions
Still in ‘Storybook View’, click on the ‘Transition’ button. Assuming you pre-loaded some of the better ones during the Setup stage, grab one and d-r-a-g it down to the timeline and drop it in between the objects. Double-click on it to open the Options and set the display time.
And, as mentioned, be sure to take a quick peek at every transition’s options, just to become familiar with what they can do. Some are, by definition of what they do, fairly restricted, but some of them (like the Masks) will change dramatically. And that green you see in many of the examples can be changed.
Titles
When you click on the ‘Title’ button, the timeline will automatically change to the real timeline mode. That’s so you can adjust the start & end points of the title.
Double-click in the big box to the left and start typing. The text box operates two ways:
- To change the actual text, double-click inside the box.
- To change anything else, click on the box once to highlight it.
Next to the ‘Font size’ box is a ‘Line spacing’ box. This is how far individual lines are spaced apart from one another.
For a nice look, click on the ‘Border/Shadow’ button, the ‘Shadow’ tab, select the second ‘A’ button. You can fine-tune it down below.
While this works fine for standard full-screen productions, if you’re doing a long, thin banner composed of pics, it would be better to put the title on the actual pics with a graphics program.
Testing and Tweaking
To test the project, go to Timeline View. You’ll note at the top of the timeline there’s a slide gadget you can move to start the test at a different spot. Hit the space bar to play and stop.
To change the start time of an object, just grab it with the mouse and slide it. To change the end time, hover the mouse over the right edge and you’ll see it change to an arrow. Grab the edge and d-r-a-g it to the desired length.
Along the top of the timeline, 2/3rds the way across, is a magnifying gadget that can help you keep an eye on things if the project is real long.
Making a DVD
Click on the ‘Share’ button at the top.
Click on ‘Create Disc’. The DVD Factory program will pop up. It’s a fairly easy program to follow. Pick a template, put your own stuff on the menu, burn the disc. Personally, for constructing DVDs, I use Sony’s DVD Architect. They’ve discontinued it and the $39 bail-out price is an absolute steal. There’s a guide for it on my big video site.
Rendering Computer Files
First, a word about codecs.
Codecs are compression programs. Raw video is simply gigantic in size (a gig per minute?), so codecs are a must. The problem is that codecs are ‘proprietary’, in the sense that one has to have the codec installed on one’s system or it won’t play the video. The classic tip-off is that it actually appears to play the vid, and you can hear the audio, but the video portion is black.
The good news is that most people who are at all into playing videos on their computers (as referred to online) have probably installed a general ‘codec pack’ and they’ll be covered. I point this out in case you were thinking of giving, say, a disc of computer clips to a friend. You’d enclose a note that if the vids don’t play, they should install a general codec pack like K-Lite.
If this is the final product, you’ll need the K-Lite Codec Pack and the Radium codec installed. If this is an intermediate step and you have lots of spare hard drive space, you only need the Huffyuv codec installed. If you’re pressed for space, forget the Huffyuv codec and install the K-Lite pack.
Click on ‘Create Video File’ and select ‘Custom’:
- Select ‘Microsoft AVI’ down below. Find the right folder and put in the file name.
- Click on ‘Options’ over to the right, then the ‘General’ tab. Select ‘User-defined’, put ’640′ in the ‘Width’ box and whatever is the proper height by aspect ratio in the ‘Height’ box. If you don’t know how to figure out the height, read this.
Click on the ‘AVI’ tab:
- If this is the final product, open the ‘Compression’ menu and select ‘Xvid’. Click on the ‘Configure’ box. The box to the left will either say ‘Target bitrate’ or ‘Target quantizer’. Click on the box, move the ‘bitrate’ slider all the way up, move the ‘quantizer’ slider all the way down.
- If this is an intermediate step, like you’re dumping the output into another program for the final render, and you’ve got gobs of hard drive space, select ‘Huffyuv’ from the ‘Compression’ menu. This is a ‘lossless’ format that won’t actually render the file (and thus lose any quality), but the file size is pretty big. If you’re pressed for hard drive space, use the Xvid codec as above.
Down below, in the audio section:
- If this is the final product, set it to ‘MPEG Layer-3′, ’192, 44′
- If this is an intermediate step, leave it on ‘PCM’.
Close the Options box and click ‘Save’ to begin the process.
Rendering Online Vids
If there’s one big, big improvement in the latest version of VideoStudio, it’s the ability to make FLV files. This has become the format-of-choice for the web as any computer and any browser can display them.
Click on ‘Create Video File’ and select ‘Custom’:
- Select ‘FLASH Files’ down below. Find the right folder and put in the file name.
- Click on ‘Options’ over to the right, then the ‘General’ tab. Select ‘User-defined’, put ’640′ in the ‘Width’ box and whatever is the proper height by aspect ratio in the ‘Height’ box. If you don’t know how to figure out the height, read this.
- Click on the ‘Compression’ tab. Set the ‘Quality’ to ‘Lev1′ and the ‘Data rate’ to ’1000′, the max.
Close the Options box and click ‘Save’ to begin the process.
Note: If you’ll notice when you click on ‘Create Video File’, there are also a bunch of presets available. In the ‘FLV’ area, the presets are in an odd order. They start with ‘best’ everywhere else, but here they go worst-best-medium. In doing some tests with the three "Lev" options, it appeared the middle one, ‘Lev1′, is the best quality, so my guess is that it’s somehow mirroring the odd order of the presets. That’s why we’re using Lev1, rather than Lev2, which would normally be the ‘best’ setting.
If the quality of your FLVs is okay, start slapping them online. I use a terrific online player called JW Player. The later versions are twice as hard to set up as the earlier versions and don’t offer the user anything extra, plus my latest version of Firefox wouldn’t work with them, so I’d suggest this version.
You’ll be dealing with one big block of code. Once you get it configured the first time, you’ll use that as your ‘template’ for future vids and the only thing you’ll have to change are the file names of the vid and preview pic.
If the quality is not acceptable, read this.