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Pushing Your Studio400 to New
Highs.....
If you've read your Users' Manual, you will know
that Studio400 not only makes movies to tape, but will also make movie
files to your hard disk. If you have read Mike Shaw's excellent Web Pages,
you will also know that it is possible to edit AVI files created with
other applications too.
The reason for this page on my site is to explore
this aspect of Studio400 - to use it purely as a digital AVI file editor,
without the need for the mixer box, or any connection to the PC.
This page will grow ....
....At the moment I shall
describe the success that I have had playing with the system as a pure NLE
editor. Ultimately I plan to describe how to produce collections of movies (avi and mpeg) on CDR,
together with a utility that will enable your audience
to select their movie from a splash screen designed by you.
Now for the basics -
Preparing an AVI file for Editing
Studio400 is capable of reading any AVI file,
providing you have the required codec (COmpressor/DECompressor) in your
system. Before it can be recognised as a valid Album file however, it is
necessary to create a SCN file to accompany it. This file is created
naturally by the Capture process, and contains scene-detection data. You
will need to to create an empty one of these, so that Studio400 can fill
it with data from your imported AVI file.
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Locate the folder that contains your AVI file
(or create a new folder, and move your file to it)
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Open Windows Notepad application, and save
the empty document with the same name as your AVI (but with the
extension .scn) to the same folder as the AVI file.
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You should do this for every AVI
that you wish to include clips from in your movie.
Opening and Editing Your AVI in Studio400.
You need to start a new (empty) project.
Select Edit tab
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Click on 'filing cabinet' and browse for
folder that contains your AVI
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Double-click on file. If this is the first
time you have opened it, Studio400 will scan the file, auto-detecting
scenes as it goes (SmartCapture), and update the SCN file.
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The Album will now be full of
clips, just as you are used to.
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Edit your movie as normal, including clips from as many AVI files as you
like.
Making Your Movie File
Select Make Movie tab
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Choose the 'disk' icon
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Name the file, and choose a
destination folder for it
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Click on 'Settings' and choose a
codec (Cinepak & Indeo are most popular). Also choose output
resolution and audio quality settings. Click OK.
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Click GO. Your movie will now be
progressively rendered out to disk.
You may now view this file in
Windows Media Player, or similar. This is how your audience will see
the movie.
Notes
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I have found that source AVIs
can be mixed, both in resolution and codec formats. The size of the
output image is determined by the output codec settings. It does not
change with clips that originated from low-res files, but expect a
degradation in the quality of those scenes.
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All AVI files used in a movie
should have the same Aspect Ratio (e.g.. 4:3) If not, they get
stretched to fit, either in width or height.
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To get the best out of NLE with
Studio400, you will need another means of capturing video. These are
not expensive. Most TV tuner cards have facilities for external video
input (I use Hauppauge WinTv). Some Graphics cards have composite
video inputs. There are also several notebook
computers with this facility too.
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The quality of output file (even
at 160x120) is superior to that captured through the mixer. (assuming
the source itself was not captured through the mixer).
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Output files can get huge -
reduce Frame Rate (use a value that is an integer division of your
source file Frame Rate), Resolution, and Audio
Sample Rate.
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The final AVI can be converted
to MPEG to reduce the file-size still further (by about a factor of
4), using a separate compression utility - more on this later.
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There are lots of tricks that
you can apply with this method of movie making, that cannot be created
on tape with Studio400. I shall be highlighting some on these pages in
the near future.
Well, this should be enough to get you started. If
you get on well with the Studio Editing software, then you will enjoy
using it to make PC Movies. In a short while I shall be posting a video
file here for you to download, as an example of what is possible.
WATCH THIS SPACE!
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