combining movie videos into 1?

[Alan]

I am new to movie maker 2 - and have recently bought a dvd burner. I have
done some work on sonic mydvd but now want to try out mm2.

I want to get about 110 minutes spread across 2 dv tapes onto my computer
and make one video from it. What would be the best way to do this? Can I
save the first dv tape as one file and do the same with the second tape.
And then somehow combine? After that I would want to edit and cut and paste
across both videos to make one movie which I would burn using Sonic Mydvd.
In sonic mydvd I would have to create 2 videos and cannot move clips from
one to the other which is why I want to try this.

thanks

alan

 

[Yahoo! Serious]

Please allow me to cut and paste as I asked this exact question
yesterday.Thanks go to John Kelly who is a whiz!
-snip-

Hi there,

Movie Maker 2 has only one Video time line. You can with loads of patience
do what you want. It will mean a lot of trial and error, moving clips
forwards and backwards on the time line. I suppose you would have to use
the audio track to get it to synchronize and that alone because of
different amplitudes etc could be very difficult.

As it seems OK to talk about other software...what you really need is the
new Version 6 of MovieDV from www.aist.de or www.aist.com. You can have
loads of video tracks and audio tracks and you can have TRUE picture in
picture and 3D movement of several images laid on top of one another,
removal of background and replace with your own (That one is hard...still
experimenting with that) You can create your own custom transitions etc.
etc. Its a totally brilliant program. Check out the video section on my
site and have a look at the FUN or FUN + video...if you are not on
broadband they will be slow to load...but it will illustrate exactly what I
mean. AIST offer it in £'s $'s or Euro's Because of the relative £ to $
etc, its much cheaper to pay for it in $. and I think the price is US $59 I
have had one complaint about the program...for some reason they have sent
it out with the version 4.5 Help system...I am promised the correct help
system as soon as its available.

What you should know about it.....At first the interface was very hard to
come to grips with....the original programmers were keen on these awful
SKIN interfaces.....there are only two skins at the moment, the one it
comes with and a pre production one. I have both and its much better than
the one the program comes with. It seems the original company was bought
out by AIST. The main advantage of that is you get the CINEGY Mpeg engine,
which I am told is a TV industry standard...I checked that as best I can
and it seems to be true. The result is when compiling to MPEG, it is both
fast and high quality.

Things that you take for granted in Movie Maker have to be set in MovieDV,
fades and things like that. The effects and transitions are all fully
programmable including playing video backwards or at speeds other than
normal, and once you "click" as it were they will blow your socks off. In
fact its safer to say that very little is cast in stone with this program.
It has had at least one bad revue, which I discovered after I had purchased
it. But now I understand the program more I can see that the Revue was way
off beam and quite inaccurate...I stuck with it though and am now very
pleased I did. Value for money compared to other much more expensive
packages is very high indeed. Having seen programs that cost as much as 20
times this....I would be very angry if I had bought one of them instead and
THEN discovered this program.

Have Fun !!

 

[Jake]

Hi Alan

I hope you have a large hard drive, as 110 minutes of DV-AVI video will
consume roughly 25MB of disk space. If you edit this down to 60 minutes
then you'll need about another 13GB of space. Okay, only 38GB of space,
which is nothing by today's standards, but a bit unwieldy nonetheless. You
would probably end up with hundreds of clips to sort through in MM2, and if
you're like me (i.e. not as organised as I should be) then you will soon be
swamped!

I'm currently editing about 6 hours of raw footage from my honeymoon, but
I'm making many separate small videos of about 5-15 minutes duration each -
I think of each one as a separate scene within an entire project. I only
capture the raw footage that's relevant to that scene when I want to edit
it. When I'm finished with the raw footage and I've rendered the final cut
for that scene I delete the raw footage from my hard drive, move the final
cut onto a DVD-RW until I need it again, defrag the hard drive and start the
next scene.

When I'm done I will bring all my small movies from DVD-RW back to my hard
drive, add them all to a MyDVD project and create my final production that
way. My project will consist of many separate DV-AVI files, but you can
tell MyDVD to move automatically from one to the next in sequence, which
looks just like one continuous movie in the final production.

Hope this is useful.

Jake

 

[Alan]

ok thanks, so if I understand correctly I can take the 2 parts of the movie
and then after editing can combine together as one project. Can I treat
each movie as a clip and import the second one into the first movie to make
one large file? My hard drive is big.

alan

 

[Jake]

Exactly right.

It's all a matter of personal preference, but I prefer to work on small bits
at a time then combine them at the end.

This becomes all the more important when you change your mind about
something at the beginning of the project and make a change (e.g. change the
duration of a transition). The effects of the change ripple right through
the rest of the project, and I'd rather fix a few things in a 5 minute clip
than fix hundreds of things in a 50 minute clip!

I also find that I can render my sub-project in the time it takes to make a
cup of tea. I can come back to the PC to see how it went, i.e. any errors
or things I'd like to change that I couldn't spot in the preview. Try doing
that 5 times over with a 50 minute project!

Jake

 

[Alan]

have you ever taken the output from MM2 and put into sonic mydvd to make
menu and burn the dvd?

alan

 

[PapaJohn \(MVP\)]

I've done that with my new laptop which came with MyDVD 4.5. Worked easily
and very well, using either DV-AVI or WMV files.

PapaJohn

 

[Jake]

Yes, I've done it a couple of times using DV-AVI files. Very simple and
very quick. I even managed to make animated buttons and a 20 second music
loop to play in the background on my first attempt!

Jake