Full Movies

The Tweener works great for making simple "morph this into that" style movies, but there are often times you want to make movies based on a series of images. You could make a series of tweener movies and then stitch them together, but there is a better way.

1. Make sure the details panel on the right is shown (click the button on the bottom right or type 'd' if it isn't shown).

2. Click the movie tab (with the "movie projector" icon).

3. Below the large image area ("the screen") is a rectangular time line box.

4. Drag the current view and drop it in this time frame (drag from the frame's border to grab the view).

5. A small frame marker will appear where you drop it - you can move this around by dragging it - to remove it, drag it out of the time line.

6. Drag additional images from your snapshot drawer, the tweener, other documents, etc... and drop them in the time line to add new key frames.

7. Dragging the slider below the time line will show you the movie at that position.

Setting a Movie's Properties

Once you've got your movie set up to your liking, you can set the movie properties (these also apply to the movies generated by the tweener). Below the movie editing area are the properties of the resulting movie:

1. Duration - by default, this is 20 seconds, you can set it up to 5 minutes. This will not change the size of the time line, rather it will stretch/shrink the existing timeline to match the new duration (so a key frame at 10 seconds in a 20 second movie occurs at 2:30 in a 5 minute movie).

2. Format - Clicking this button will bring up the Quicktime Movie exporter configuration dialog. By default, movies are generated as "Video" which will give perfect quality, but the resulting movies will be very large. "MPEG-4 Video" is a good choice to share these movies on the web.

3. Size - This popup determines the size of the resulting image, based on the aspect ratio of the document.

4. Antialias - clicking this box will result in movies where each frame is antialiased, slowing down the generation of the movie, but resulting in smoother edgeds.

5. Make Movie - clicking this button will prompt you for location to save your movie, and will then begin rendering the movie (this will be done in the background, like printing or rendering the image to a file, so you can continue to work with quadrium).