This Creates a new Movie project, which you add movie clips to it and then apply effects (fade in/fade out/cross fades) and titling to each movie clip. If you have Quicktime 3 installed (3.0b11c2 is the most current as of January 26th, 1998), you can also apply snazzy QuickTime 3 effects to movies.
The Edit Video Project Window allows you to create a Movie Project, which is a small container for holding your movie clips and applying affects to them. It's designed to be simplistic in both scope and nature, so people can click on a few buttons and get a finnished product out. It also makes for very small projects, as only references to the movies are stored, no actual movie data.
In the Project window is a list of the movie files you've added (initally none) and you use the Add, Delete, Up and Down buttons to Add in new clips, Delete existing clips or change the order of them (via the up/down buttons).
To add a single movie, click on the add button. To Add multiple movies, select the movies files from a folder on your desktop, drag and then drop them on the MyVideoEditor application. The movies will then appear in the Movie List.
The Info button gets you information on the currently selected movie clip, such as number of frames, duration, data rates and movie size. To the right of the button is the text indicating the start, end and duration (in seconds) of the currently selected movie.
The Save button saves your Project and the Cancel button prevents any changes from being saved.
The First and Last titles display the First and Last Video frames of the currently selected item in the Movie list. The Next item displays the next frame in the next clip, so you can see what happens when you move between the current and next clip.
The Start Effect and End Effect chunks refer to effects or Titling you want to apply to the Start and End of each clip. Each clip can have a start or end effect. The Video, Audio and Title checkboxes allow you to have the selected effect (None, Fade In or Fade Out for Start Effects and None, Fade In, Fade Out or Cross Fade for End effects) to it. For instance, you can have the audio faded in a movie with a fading out title at the start of a movie and have the video fade out at the end but no title or sound fading.
Cross Fades are applied to both the End of the selected clip and the start of the next clip after it. Cross Fading is always applied to the video and audio of both clips and they can not have titles. Currently you can change the Start Effect for the following clip even if you have Cross faded the previous clip, but when you create the movie from the Project, MyVideoEditor will ignore them (Cross fades always take precedence over other effects).
To the right of the Start Effect / End Effect items are pop up menus for specifying the duration (in seconds ) for each affect and range from 0.25 to 10.0 seconds. This duration can be up to 1/2 the duration of the movie (ie up to 5 seconds for a 10 second movie clip).
The Set… Button to the right of the Title checkbox allows you to fill in how you want your titling to be set up, via the Titling dialog. You get 4 256 character "Strings" to use for titles ( they show up as the numbers 1,2,3,4 in the window if they don't contain any text). Each title can be dragged inside of the "Preview" area (click on one and drag it around). You use the controls in the right half of the dialog to select a font, size, style, fore color, shadow color, shadow offset (+/- 8 pixels in offset) and the bottom Edit field for typing in text for the field. Titles can be faded in and out independently from the video or audio, which is what the Title effect (None, Fade In, Fade Out or Fade In And Out) pop up is for. It applys to All titles, not individual ones. The Fade in and Fade out item does exactly that .. it fades the titles in, then holds them at full intensity and then fades them out again (each part having 1/3 of your Specified Duration so a 3 second effect will have 1 second to fade in, then 1 second to hold and 1 second to fade out).
The Break button brings up a "FilmStrip window", which allows you to look at small size (80 by 60 pixel thumbnails) of every frame in a movie. You can use this to Split a movie into two halves and although a bit akward, it could be used to trim off the start and end parts of a movie.
The Scale Pop up allows you to change the Time scale for displaying the movie filmstrips, 1 to 1 corresponds to every frame in the movie, 2 to 1 will result in every 2nd frame being displayed, 10 to 1 results in every 10th frame being displayed. The Left and Right buttons allow you to scroll different frames into position and can be used to navigate through the frames in a movie. If you click and hold down the mouse on a button, the film strip will continue to scroll until you release the mouse or you hit the start/end of the movie.
If you put the arrow cursor over a frame in the filmstrip and click the mouse, a gray hilite line will appear, which is an insertion point marker. You can then click on the Insert Break button to place a break point in the movie, which will splits the movie into 2 chunks if you click on the Okay button. Once you've inserted a break, the Break button changes to Remove Break, so you can delete the break point.
NOTE: When you click on an individual frame in the filmstrip you may notice that the gray hilite line may not correspond to the start or end of that frame, especially with movies that have variable frame rates (ie like an average frame rate of 15 fps, but some frames are 25 fps and others are 10 fps). This IS NOT A BUG, its simply showing you when in time the start/end of the frame actually occurs at. Breaking of video clips is done on a Frame basis, rather than a time basis as most other Video editors do it. This means unless your video clip is using a fixed frame rate (ie like exactly 12, 15, 24, 30 fps), you can't break off a chunk of video that is precisely 1.00 seconds long. However, this does mean your not going to wind up with an individual frame that could be 1/600 th of a second, because it just slightly runs over the edge where you did your break.
Open Project…
This opens an existing Movie Project and allows you to modify the movie clips contained in an existing Movie Project. Double clicking on an existing project will also open it.
Compress> Sub Menu
Proj Preview Movie…
This opens an existing Movie Project, generates your effects and then saves them in a new movie. The created movie is a reference movie, which means only the effects are saved in it and the non effect parts of movies are added in as references. You would mainly use this to generate a preliminary preview of your movie, seeing how the applied effects work and how the movie is going to play, which can saves both time and space. There is an AppleScript command for this item too.
You can either use "Movie…" to re-compress the movie into a self contained movie or Flatten Movie (below) to flatten the movie and remove all references. After you open the project, you are asked to fill in how you want the sound compressed (none, maced, IMA4 - bit depth, rates, stereo-mono etc.), via the Sound Track Settings dialog.
Proj Final Movie…
This opens an existing Movie Project, processes every frame in the project (applying affects, doing frame tweening etc.,etc) and then saves them in a new movie. The created movie is a self contained movie and has no "references" to any external movies. After you open the project, you are asked to fill in how you want the sound compressed (none, maced, IMA4 - bit depth, rates, stereo-mono etc.) with the Sound Track Settings dialog. There is an AppleScript command for this item too.
Movie…
This re-compresses a movie (you pick it via the open file dialog) based on your current compression settings and other options. After you open the movie, you are asked to fill in how you want the sound compressed (none, maced, IMA4 - bit depth, rates, stereo-mono etc.) with the Sound Track Settings dialog. There is an AppleScript command for this item too.
PJGT to Movie…
This takes a single or series of numbered Pict,JPEG, GIFf or TIFF (PJGT) files and then makes a QT movie out of them. Your prompted to select the first and last PJGT files (via open file dialog) and then it uses the current compression (compressor, key frames, frame rate, movie sizes etc.) settings to make the movie from them. The PJGT files must all be in the same folder.
If you only select a single file (ie select a PJGT file in the first open file dialog and select the same PJGT again), another dialog appears that asks you for the duration you want to make the movie and whether to make a single frame movie (the movie consists of 1 frame which will be the duration you enter). If you do not check the Single frame check box, the current Frame rate you've selected is used (ie you enter a duration of 2.0 seconds with a frame rate of 15.0, then the movie will have 30 frames).
I've had great success using "PJGT to Movie…" to make slide shows of images rather than keeping them as separate jpeg/gif/tiff in an archive. What I use is the following. From the Options menu, set Compressor to "Photo - Jpeg", set Frame Rate to "1", set Quality to "High" and make sure that "Natural Frame Rates", "Use Filtering", "Use Cropping" are not checked.
The "Movie Size" items allow you to control the dimensions of the final movie. Setting it to a fixed size like 640x480 means that all the images you use to make the movie will be scaled proportionally to fit within a 640 x 480 frame. So if one of your images is 960 x 420 pixels, it's scaled proportionally so it fits in the 640x480 movie frame (it will become 640 x 280 size in the movie) and another is say 512 x 400, it's not scaled (it fits inside the 640 x 480 movie), but will be centered in the 640x480 movie. If you check mark the "Actual", "Double" or "Half" size items, the first PJGT image you select will be used to set the dimensions of the movie . So if the first PJGT file is 800 x 600 in size, the movie is 800 x 600 using "Actual", 400 x 300 using "Half" and 1600 x 1200 with "Double". The remaining images are scaled appropriately to fit within this frame.
Export> Sub Menu
Video Movie, Audio Movie, Midi Movie, TimeCode Movie, Sprite Movie, QD3D Movie, Tween Movie, Text Movie
Each of the above items allows you to open a movie and then extract that type of track(s) from it and save it into a new movie file. If the movie does not contain the type of track data you ask for, you get an error dialog stating there is nothing to export.
AIFF…
Extracts an AIF (Audio InterChange Format) file from a movie, an AIFF, System 7 Sound or Wav file and then allows you to save (or convert and save) it into another AIF file.
Picts from Movie…
This dissembles a movie into into a series of numbered picts. You get an open file dialog to select the movie, then a dialog for setting the options (color depth etc.) and then a Save file dialog to specify suffix name for the pict (ie entering 'aa' will result in the picts being called 'aa00001.pict' etc.
Flatten Movie…
This Flattens an existing movie, removing all movie references, optimizing the audio interleave and then saves it with a new name. There is an AppleScript command for this item too.
Cross Platform Movie…
This Flattens an existing movie, removing all movie references, optimizing the audio interleave, merges the resource and data forks (which makes it cross platform) and then saves it with a new name. There is an AppleScript command for this item too.
Add QT3 Effect Track…
This allows you to add a quicktime 3 single effect to a movie (like color adjustment, film noise, sharpen, blur etc.). Select this item, then use the Open Movie dialog to select the movie to apply the effect to. Next the Select Affect… dialog appears and you can use it to select the effect to apply. Click the Okay button to accept your effect and when the Save movie as dialog appears, enter the name of the movie to save and click "Save". The "Effects" movie you created is saved as a reference movie (meaning that if the original is lost, it won't play). If you want to make the "Effects" movie self contained, then use Flatten Movie… or Cross Platform Movie… (above) to make it self contained and the effect is permanently embedded in the flattened movie.
NOTE: DO NOT ADD QT3 Video effects to a movie that already has QT3 Video Effects or it will go really strange on playback.
Utility> Sub Menu
ClipBoard to Pict
This simply exports whatever is in the clipboard as a pict file to disk, at a specified color depth and size.
Add Midi to Movie…
This will add a Midi movie track to an existing movie. The first open file dialog wants you to select a midi file or movie, then the second dialog asks you for the Movie to Add the Midi too. Your then prompted to save the combined movie with a new name. The duration of the midi file/movie is automautically "trimmed" to the duration of the movie your adding it to (ie the midi file/movie might be 5 minutes - the movie is 4 minutes, therfore the last 1 minute of the midi is not added).
Add Snd to Movie…
This will add a Sound movie track or AIF/AIFC file to an existing movie. The first open file dialog wants you to select a sound movie/aiff/aifc file (SAFC for short), then the second dialog asks you for the Movie to Add the SAFC too. You are then prompted to save the combined movie with a new name. The duration of the SAFC is automautically "trimmed" to the duration of the movie your adding it to (ie the SAFC might be 5 minutes - the movie is 4 minutes, therfore the last 1 minute of the SAFC is not added).
AIFs to Stereo…
This will take 2 mono uncompressed AIF files and then combine them into a stereo AIFF file. The first AIFF file you select is the left channel, the second AIFF file becomes the right channel. The length of the resulting AIF file is the same as the shortest of the 2 aiff files (if the first file is 4 seconds and the second file is 6 seconds long, the resulting file is 4 seconds in length).
Ambient Audio…
This takes a single mono uncompressed AIF file, creates a Stereo AIF file from it and then allows you to fade it across each channel at a specified rate. Essentially it makes it "appear" that the sound is moving back across the stereo speakers or headset (ie moving from left channel to the right channel and then back and forth). I've actually experienced "nausea" with ambient audio and an aiff recording of a helicopter (using a 0.25 second value for the alternating tracks from right to left) with stereo headphones on.
Edit Menu
The cut copy paste etc. items are not used currently.
The Sound Prefs… and Titling Prefs… items allow you to specify defaults for the sound tracks in movies you compress (via Proj to Ref Movie, Proj to Self Movie or ReCompress Movie) and the default (actual text, font, size, color, shadows etc.) for any Titling you may add to a movie.
Options Menu
Settings> Sub Menu
TheSettings submenu allows you to Create, Delete and Apply your Quicktime Settings (EVERYTHING in the Options menu, cropping, filters, frame rate, key rate, compressor etc.).
The Save Settings item allows you to save the Current settings by name, and then the settings are added to the end of this menu.
The Delete Settings allows you to delete any settings you've created.
To change the Current Quicktime Settings to one you've created, select the item's name from the end of the menu to Apply it. There is an AppleScript command for Settings that allows you to select them by number (the same order as the Settings are listed).
Compressor> Sub Menu
This ia a list of all the available QT codecs. Select one to set the default compressor to use for making QT movies (ie Proj to Movie, Pict to Movie… and compress Movie…). The Key Frame Rate, Cinepak Options and Rate Constraint items may become disabled if the compressor you select does not support those features.
Quality> Sub Menu
This allows you to select the Temporal and Spatial Quality of the QT movie your creating (ie Pict to Movie… and Recompress Movie…) The Last item on the menu lets you enter a numeric value for the quality, rather than just selecting a quality from the menu, which allows you to over drive the compressor for very high quality movies with Cinepak.
Frame Rate> Sub Menu
This is a list of the Frame rates that you can compress the movie at, select one to use it. Checking the Natural Frame Rate item (below) will override this selection and the duration of each frame in the compressed movie will be the same as the original, which is called a Natural Rate Movie.
Key Frame Rate> Sub Menu
This is the number of Key frames (for intra frame spatial compression) that are to be inserted in the movie. Generally speaking it should be the same as the Frame Rate. If your currently selected Compressor can not do Key Framing (ie None, Photo JPEG, M-JPEG can't for example), this item will be disabled.
Movie Size> Sub Menu
These allow you to specify the size of the QT Movie your creating (via Pict to Movie… Compress Movie…, Compress Proj to Movie etc.). Normally, you'll just check the QT Actual Size item so the source and resulting movie are the same height - width dimensions.
Cinepak Options> Sub Menu
The Cinepak options are specific to the Cinepak compressor and you can't use or access them unless you've selected Cinepak from the Compressor Sub Menu.
Use Var Compression
Check this item to use variable intraframe compression and uncheck it to not use. You should principally use it when creating Cinepak movies, which can increase the quality of a movie for playback. Var Compression will only apply if you are creating a movie that support intraframe compression and the Key Frame Rate is > 1, otherwise it does nothing.
Set Var Compression…
This brings up the "Change Quality When" dialog with the "If Sim <" XX and "or Sim >"XX fields. The values you enter (1 to 254) control when MyVideoEditor should increase or decrease the quality of the movie to certain limits. MyVideoEditor will never increase the quality value beyond 2048 and will not decrease the value below your lowest quality setting (as set in the Quality sub menu).
A little background. When you use intra frame/temporal compression with the Cinepak Codec, it compares the last compressed frame and the current frame it's compressing, and then only saves the changes (difference) between them. This reduces the size of the movie by not saving redundant parts of each frame. The difference between the last and the current compressed video frame is the called the Similarity value and is returned to MyVideoEditor by the compressor after the image is compressed.
With fairly static movies (ie people moving in front of say a sky or a wall) you can wind up with large similarity values and Cinepak has a nasty habit of over compressing the movie, which results in large block chunks or artifact images when moving from a difference frame to a key frame, especially with 320x240 size movies. The trick is to get a consistent similarity value in the range of 5 to 20, which results in good Cinepak compressed movie quality and reasonably tight file sizes.
During Compression, MyVideoEditor keeps track of the similarity value reported after a movie frame is compressed (it actually shows you what it is during compression in the Sim: field in the Compressing window) and then uses this similarity and your limits to decide if it needs to change the movie quality. By adjusting the Quality value on the fly, we can eliminate or significantly reduce an "overzealous" Cinepak compressor.
The "If Sim <" field (1 to 254 - a 5 value is good choice) controls when compression should be decreased, which prevents MyVideoEditor from moving the quality to 2048 and simply staying there for the rest of the movie, which would unduly increase the size of the movie (higher quality = less compression = larger movie size)
The "or Sim >" field (1 to 254 - usually a 20 value is good choice) controls when to begin increasing the quality, so any time the value exceeds 20, MyVideoEditor increase the movie quality for you up to a value of 2048.
Update Prev Comp
This forces the Cinepak compressor to make it's comparisons for similarity based on the previously compressed image VS the original uncompressed image. For noisy movies (lots of video noise, poor tape quality etc.), it tends to produce slightly better image quality and smaller file size.
Rate Constraint
Rate Constraint> Sub Menu
Some compressor (Cinepak or Soreson for example) allow you to specify a constraining value, so that the video part of movie does not exceed a specified number of kilobytes per second. Primarily you would use this prevent poor playback performance from slow delivery systems, like a 2 x (times) CD-Rom or over the internet. To apply constraints, check mark the appropriate value (none means no constraints, 10K means 10 K per second). NOTE: The value you specify only applies to the video part of your movie, NOT the audio. This means that if you specify 20K per second for the video and have audio at 11 khz mono 8 bit sound (11 K/sec), the total rate will be about 33 K per second.
Options Menu (Continued)
Natural Frame Rate
Unchecking this results in the QT movie to be created using your specified QT Frame Rate value (ie 10, 15, 30 FPS etc.), which means each frame in a movie would be exactly the same duration and is known as a Fixed Rate movie. Checking this item results in each frame in the resulting movie to have the same duration as the source movie. So if your source movie has a mix of frame rates like 10, 12, 1 and 30 frames per second, the resulting movie will have a mix of frame rates. This option can save a lot of space and processing time.
MyVideoEditor can automatically generate intermediate images from the two video frames around it) if Natural Frame Rate is unchecked and the selected Frame Rate is greater than or equal to the source movies frame rate. For example, if your source movie is at 15 frames per second, and your recompressed movie is at 30 frames per second, MyVideoEditor will create an intermediate image by proportionally blending the adjacent frames. This does produce better looking video than just duplicating the previous video frame, which is what you'd get without it.
ReSet Keys
Check this item if you want a key frame re-set any time the similarity value drops to 1. This will force a new key frame to be inserted and re-set the key frame counter. This can result in most of your video frames becoming key frames if the video is really noisy. This has no effect unless you have the KeyFrame Rate set to > 1 and the compressor your using can do temporal compression (ie cinepak etc.)
Use Filtering
Check this item to use image filtering of each frame in a movie and uncheck it to not use. You should principally only use Filtering when with noisy video will remove color noise and help the cinepak (and others) compressor produce better looking movies. Filtering will increase the amount of time needed to compress a movie.
Set Filtering…
This brings up the Filters dialog that allows you to specify the values for filtering (and custom cropping) each frame in a Quicktime movie as it is compressed. The dialog allows you specify a Blend: value (0 to 100), a Despek: value (0 to 100) and the location and size of a cropping rectangle. The dialog has 2 images in it, the left one is the source and the right one is the effect. You can then actually see what the blend / despek filters do to your images as you change parameters.
Blend (Blending) allows you to smooth out pixels of consistent color without unduly removing details and should be a number between 1 and 20 (a 0 value turns it off). The higher the value, the more blended the image will be.
DeSpeck (De-Speckle) allows you to remove single pixel noise, like a white dot in a black image or a black dot in a white image. It should be a number between 85 to 99 (100 turns it off). It can remove fine details if it is set too high.
The Change Pixels checkbox shows you which pixels in the resulting image (the right side image) will be affected. Check mark it and then click the Apply button to see which pixels are being changed using your values. Uncheck it and click apply to see what the actual image will look like after filtering.
MyVidEditor has three 160x120 images in that you can use to experiment with filtering options. The next button advances to the next image and in order of appearance they are a woman with a light background, then a closeup eyeball, then a scene from some jungle movie. If you want to use another image, like a single frame from a Quicktime movie, just copy it in a movie player application, make sure it's in the clipboard as a pict file and then choose, Set Filtering. The pict image will then appear in the source and effects parts of the dialog and you can experiment with filtering that.
Use Cropping
Check this to to use your currently specified cropping values. Cropping only applies to Compress> Movie… and Proj Final Movie. You can't crop a reference movie.
Set Cropping
This brings up a dialog that allows you to specify the top left corner and dimensions for cropping a movie.
