![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccatoriaSo, there was some interest in a "here's what I've learned about WMM in my three years of continuing to use it like the idiot I am," type of post. So - here it is!
Basically, don't panic. It's not as bad as you might think.
Also, before we start, DISCLAIMERS:
I'm far from the most technically accomplished WMM vidder. Actually I'm not very technical at all. Everything technical in here I learned on my own through my own frustration and determination, and so many of these workarounds are probably both inefficient and hilarious! I also apologise if there's really insultingly basic stuff in here. I'm just trying to think of everything I wish someone had sat me down and told me when I started off on this, and I figure it's better I tell you something completely obvious than assume everyone knows this program pretty well to start with.
And now SOLICITATIONS:
Got a tip I didn't include? COMMENT!
Got a specific question I didn't cover/something I explained badly and you don't understand? COMMENT!
And now, WITHOUT FURTHER ADO:
1. Crashing
WMM will crash. It just will. Save often. CTRL + S is your friend. However, there are ways to minimise crashing.
- WMM will crash more when you're editing a clip-heavy, long project. If it's getting unbearable, temporarily remove the soundtrack, render only the clips as a good quality .wmv file, then reimport that file into WMM, drop it on the timeline with your soundtrack and keep editing from there. The first X minutes of your song will now be a single clip (and from a .wmv file which WMM likes more - see below) and this should stop it from crashing so obnoxiously. Downside to this is that if you want to go back and change anything in the first half of the vid, you're now working from two separate project files.
- WMM likes .wmv files more than .avi files. Personally I just tough it out with the .avi files - it doesn't bother me that much. But then again, WMM crashes less for me than I know it does with many other users. I can't vouch for this method personally, but I know at least one other person who drops her .avi source files into WMM then renders them as .wmv files first off so that she's working from .wmv source files.
- WMM will often tell me its stopped responding, but frequently if I click away from the program and go do something else (like say, type up an FAQ-type WMM guide on my LJ: can you guess what WMM is doing in my other window?), then click back after a few seconds, it's fine again. In general WMM doesn't like to be told to do things too quickly. If it's not doing something, clicking again is likely to make it stop responding. Just treat it like a tempramental glacier.
- How many custom effects to you have installed (see below for advice on custom effects), and which ones? When I install too many - and especially when I install some really complex ones like Rehan's color pass stuff, it grinds my system to a halt. Because it's very easy to install/uninstall WMM custom effects, I leave the problematic ones out of my default set-up. I can always install them for a specific project if I ever need to.
- Reboot your computer. Sometimes WMM is glitching because your system needs a refresh, not becuase WMM itself is being particularly awful.
2. Rendering problems & aspect ratio issues.
- OMG WMM is dropping clips and I get random black clips instead of whatever prettiness I intended to be there!
Yes. This happens sometimes. There's some kind of arcane critical mass that WMM will reach with regards to number of clips and number of different source files the clips are from, and then it will flip out and start dropping clips and just refusing to render them. The easiest fix for this is to render your project is sections (i.e. remove the soundtrack and render the first through fiftieth clip, then the fifty-first through one-hundredth clip, then the hundred and first through hundred and fiftieth clip, etc.), then reimport those back into .wmv and put them back over the soundtrack.
I have no rule of thumb about knowing when it'll start clip-dropping. I've used over a thousand clips in one vid, but they were all from the same .wmv file so the program had no trouble with it. Usually it's something that doesn't start acting up unless I go well over the three-minute mark and I'm cutting and effecting a fair number of clips. Then again, it once started happening to me in a vid that was a minute and a half long. As I said, ARCANE WMM MACHINATIONS.
- OMG WMM isn't dropping clips but I do have horrible rendering glitches that look blocky and weird and awful!
Yes, this happens too. This doesn't happen so much to me, so unfortunately I'm not an expert on avoiding it. It's only been a serious problem for me with one vid which I basically just gritted my way through and finally got a clean render. Using the above technique of rendering in smaller chunks helps. Rebooting your computer or restarting WMM can also help. But ultimately you may just have to keep rerendering until you get a clean sweep. You will get one eventually.
- OMG I render it and it shows up all weird - the bottom half of the screen is a big green line and the vid is all squashed into the top half!
This is one of your codecs being weird. You just need to disable it in WMM. Go to Tools --> Options --> Compatibility and uncheck the codec that's giving you trouble. If you don't know which one it is just...keep trying until you find it, I guess?
I know that DIVX and XVID are frequently culprits.
- ETA an issue I'm experiencing right now and should have remembered to detail! Which is: OMG WMM renders fine until X% and then stops and says that it can't save to the hard drive location and that I should check my source files. WHAT DO I DO?
If the file was rendering fine before, then likely you just have a problem with a single clip. Watch at what per centage the thing fails to render in order to get an idea of what clip. It'll glitch quite badly, perhaps even refuse to play entirely, when you play it back in WMM too. Which will also help identify the issue.
All you need to do is delete that clip, recut it ever so slightly, like, cut it .07 seconds later or earlier or something, and put it back on the timeline. It should work now.
I have no idea why it does this, but it seems that sometimes the clip gets corrupted or something but that it's not reflective of the quality of the source so simply recutting the clip sorts it out? *guesswork*
If the above doesn't work, you can also try rendering the problematic clip on its own as a .wmv file and them reimporting it.
- OMG ASPECT RATIOS WTF?
To a degree, WMM will try and fit whatever you drop into it into its own preset sizes. This usually isn't a perfect fit and you end up with very narrow letterbox lines above and below or to one side of the image. When you use sources with different aspect ratios, this may vary from clip to clip (i.e. one clip may have narrow letterbox lines above and below while the next has a line down the side). If you're a crazy perfectionist like me, you can use source that's all the same size (personally I use 624x352 or 720x408), but the difference is pretty small and a lot of people just leave it. This is something that occurs in other vidding programs too from what I can tell.
When you use WMM effects to pan or zoom, WMM will automatically fill its entire preset screen size, even the letterbox lines that the clips don't occupy. As I said above, the difference is usually small enough that a non-perfectionist won't care, but perfectionists may wish to be aware of this and consider using a source that closely approximates WMM's presets.
This is most likely to be an issue when you are using source which already has significant letterbox lines above and below as suddenly your huge letterbox lines will disappear when you choose to zoom. A few pixels is negligable. An extra third of the size suddenly appearing and disappearing whenever you've chosen to zoom in on part of a shot is pretty obvious. So if you plan on panning or zooming AT ALL with WMM, I highly recomment using source material that's made up only of the image and no letterbox lines.
- OMG the WMM preset I use shows up in the correct aspect ratio in Windows Media Player but shows up warped in all other players!
Yeah, I have no idea why this is. I suspect Microsoft shennanigans. The only way around it is to resize it as another file format. Unfortunately .wmv files don't resize very well. They tend to get jerky or lose quality. I would welcome any technical whizzes explaining either why this is or how you can sort out this issue in a less complex fashion than I've devised, but here's what I do.
1) Convert my .wmv file to .mp4 format using my PSP media converter (I have ImToo PSP Video Converter 3, for the record). I'm not resizing it at this point, just converting it to .mp4 because I can't find a decent way to convert it straight to .avi without it glitching and the program the other program I have hates .wmv files in general. You may be able to complete steps one and two with the same program. If so, let me know which one!
2) Convert my new .mp4 file to .avi and resize it. For this I use MOVAVI Video Suite 3.4.
3) If frame rates confuse you (as they do me) remember that there are two standard frame rates - 25fps and 29.97 (sometimes rounded to 30)fps. If you're using the wrong one that can sometimes cause glitches too, so try the other one if you're in doubt.
3. Cutting, ghost frames & making the most of the effects available.
- Never, ever cut on the first frame after a change of shots. You may well end up with ghost frames. Ghost frames are when - after rendering - you end up with a split second of another shot in your vid where it shouldn't be. WMM is...imprecise and can end up pulling in images from a few frames either side. It's frustrating if you're working with an extremely short shot, but far less frustrating than ending up with ghost frames everywhere. My suggestion is to click the forward button (which moves you .03 seconds ahead) until you've got the first image of the shot you need, then click that button at least once more, preferably twice more (which would put you at most .07 seconds beyond the shot change). Observe this rule at the end of the clip too.
- When you have a clip on the timeline you can just click on the end of the clip and drag it to make it shorter or longer (though never longer than the length you cut it to in the folder view). It will only do this in increments of either .03 or .04 of a second. Usually this is short enough for timing purposes, but if you specifically need a clip to be a certain length to the decisecond (or whatever they're called) you'll have to actually cut it to that length before dropping it on the timeline.
I usually make clips longer than I think I'll need just because then I have the freedom to shorten or lengthen it as needed without having to recut it every time.
- If you drop a clip onto the timeline, then click on it and drag it over the prior clip, you will get an automatic crossfade. I know this is probably an obvious one but it did take me a couple of tries to find out (then again, I was basically effects-phobic for my first few vids so I'm sure my learning curve was kind of ridiculous in that area). The benefit to this - quite aside from not having to click into the transitions section every time you want a crossfade - is that by dragging you can specify the length of your fade without the ridiculously imprecise "Transition Length" option that only lets you start at .25 and then increase by quarter second increments.
While all other transitions required you to actually select them from the transitions folder, they can be similarly modified in terms of length by dragging.
- Effects can be added to the clip by right-clicking on it and then clicking on "effects". It'll bring up a little window where you can select all the effects you want at once from a menu rather than dragging each one onto the clip from the effects folder each time.
- Random Effect Tip #1: Remember that you can turn continuous footage into several effects. I mean, that's really obvious technically but it's something that people don't always immediately think of. So for instance, I have a clip of someone walking from point A to point B and it takes 3 seconds I can turn that into three clips - 0.00 - 1.23 seconds, 1.24 - 2.44 seconds and 2.45 - 3.00 seconds, even though it'll look identical to using a single, continuous clip.
Then WHY, I hear you ask, would one do such a thing?
Because then you can add different effects to different sections of the clip. It's mainly useful for time-toggles. So for example, in the above instance, I could speed up the first clip, slow down the second and leave the third as normal. Now instead of someone walking from A to B at normal speed I have someone walking very quickly, suddenly going into slo-mo, then speeding up a little. But it's still part of a the same fluid piece of footage. That would be a very obvious time-toggle.
But it can also be useful if your clip is too short for your intended purpose, like you have a 1.00 second clip that needs to be 1.20 seconds long. You can slow just the last part of the clip, or just a second in the middle where people are staying still anyway, and it can look pretty invisible. The reverse being that you can speed up parts of the clip in order to fit more of the action into a shorter time-frame without having to make everyone look like they're part of some crazy animation sequence.
(Note: beware native camera movement as this can be a dead giveaway to speeding up/slowing down footage even if the actors are still).
- Random Effect Tip #2: This is an extension of Random Effect Tip #1. If you don't just cut up a continuous piece of footage into numerous clips but actually overlap those clips' timestamps, you can fade in and out of the same clip 'invisibly'.
So again, example, I have a three second long clip. I cut it into three clips.
Clip 1: 0.00 - 1.50
Clip 2: 1.00 - 2.50
Clip 3: 2.00 - 3.00
As you can see, there's 0.50 seconds of overlap between the clips (and yes, doing this means you need to create clip one, drop it on the timeline, then rejoin clip one to the rest of the clip up in the 'folder' section of WMM and recut at the earlier time to make clip two, drop that on the timeline, then repeat. It's time consuming; much about tricking WMM into giving you better effects is, sadly).
So if I put a 0.50 crossfade in between each clip, then the footage that they're fading between is identical. So the fade is totally invisible.
Again, the benefit of this isn't apparent until you start using effects. So if put grayscale effects on Clip 1 and Clip 3, but not Clip 2, you'd see it running in grayscale between 0.00 and 1.00, fading into colour between 1.00 and 1.50, in colour between 1.50 and 2.00, fading into grayscale between 2.00 and 2.50 and then in grayscale between 2.50 and 3.00.
...I hope that wasn't too confusing. It's a great technique but a difficult one to explain rather than show. :(
4. Custom effects.
- Custom effects are available for WMM. Custom effects for WMM Vista will not work with WMM XP and vice versa, so be aware of what you're downloading. There are custom effects for bluescreening, for overlays, for negative images, for colour passes (though the ones I have aren't great sadly), for hue changes, for warming or cooling the colours of footage, for making those "glowy" type clip transitions; all kinds. Most of the better ones come with their own installers so you don't need to know too much about how to install them. Though even the ones that don't are usually as simple as creating a new folder in your WMM program files folder and dropping a file into it.
- Start with Rehan's Shader TFX package. It's a two week trial with only limited functionality after that if you don't pay a fee for it, but it's worth downloading anyway because the limited functionality includes nifty stuff like bluescreening, picture-in-picture and some other good stuff, and also because a fair few other custom effects need you to have the free version of this installed in order to work. There's also a bunch more stuff on that site both free and not-free for WMM. It's probably the highest profile place to go for custom effects.
http://www.rehanfx.org/shader.htm
- Another site I recommend is Blaine's WMM blog where you can get some really good effects including the one I use for overlays.
http://movies.blainesville.com/search/label/custom
- Finally if you've really got the custom effects bug, this forum will furnish you with more and can probably provide you with much more help than I can if you want to go down the road of creating your own custom effects with XML. I wouldn't have the first idea about doing that!
http://www.windowsmoviemakers.net/Forums/ShowForum.aspx?&ForumID=33
- I know of no way to make WMM play clips in reverse. Sorry. I think that not even Rehan has that sorted yet. In the meantime, should you feel the need, I have heard that this freeware program is good, though I have no personal experience with it.
http://www.xander.free.fr/info/Time_Reversal/index_en.html
And...I think that's it?
Any questions? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
Basically, don't panic. It's not as bad as you might think.
Also, before we start, DISCLAIMERS:
I'm far from the most technically accomplished WMM vidder. Actually I'm not very technical at all. Everything technical in here I learned on my own through my own frustration and determination, and so many of these workarounds are probably both inefficient and hilarious! I also apologise if there's really insultingly basic stuff in here. I'm just trying to think of everything I wish someone had sat me down and told me when I started off on this, and I figure it's better I tell you something completely obvious than assume everyone knows this program pretty well to start with.
And now SOLICITATIONS:
Got a tip I didn't include? COMMENT!
Got a specific question I didn't cover/something I explained badly and you don't understand? COMMENT!
And now, WITHOUT FURTHER ADO:
1. Crashing
WMM will crash. It just will. Save often. CTRL + S is your friend. However, there are ways to minimise crashing.
- WMM will crash more when you're editing a clip-heavy, long project. If it's getting unbearable, temporarily remove the soundtrack, render only the clips as a good quality .wmv file, then reimport that file into WMM, drop it on the timeline with your soundtrack and keep editing from there. The first X minutes of your song will now be a single clip (and from a .wmv file which WMM likes more - see below) and this should stop it from crashing so obnoxiously. Downside to this is that if you want to go back and change anything in the first half of the vid, you're now working from two separate project files.
- WMM likes .wmv files more than .avi files. Personally I just tough it out with the .avi files - it doesn't bother me that much. But then again, WMM crashes less for me than I know it does with many other users. I can't vouch for this method personally, but I know at least one other person who drops her .avi source files into WMM then renders them as .wmv files first off so that she's working from .wmv source files.
- WMM will often tell me its stopped responding, but frequently if I click away from the program and go do something else (like say, type up an FAQ-type WMM guide on my LJ: can you guess what WMM is doing in my other window?), then click back after a few seconds, it's fine again. In general WMM doesn't like to be told to do things too quickly. If it's not doing something, clicking again is likely to make it stop responding. Just treat it like a tempramental glacier.
- How many custom effects to you have installed (see below for advice on custom effects), and which ones? When I install too many - and especially when I install some really complex ones like Rehan's color pass stuff, it grinds my system to a halt. Because it's very easy to install/uninstall WMM custom effects, I leave the problematic ones out of my default set-up. I can always install them for a specific project if I ever need to.
- Reboot your computer. Sometimes WMM is glitching because your system needs a refresh, not becuase WMM itself is being particularly awful.
2. Rendering problems & aspect ratio issues.
- OMG WMM is dropping clips and I get random black clips instead of whatever prettiness I intended to be there!
Yes. This happens sometimes. There's some kind of arcane critical mass that WMM will reach with regards to number of clips and number of different source files the clips are from, and then it will flip out and start dropping clips and just refusing to render them. The easiest fix for this is to render your project is sections (i.e. remove the soundtrack and render the first through fiftieth clip, then the fifty-first through one-hundredth clip, then the hundred and first through hundred and fiftieth clip, etc.), then reimport those back into .wmv and put them back over the soundtrack.
I have no rule of thumb about knowing when it'll start clip-dropping. I've used over a thousand clips in one vid, but they were all from the same .wmv file so the program had no trouble with it. Usually it's something that doesn't start acting up unless I go well over the three-minute mark and I'm cutting and effecting a fair number of clips. Then again, it once started happening to me in a vid that was a minute and a half long. As I said, ARCANE WMM MACHINATIONS.
- OMG WMM isn't dropping clips but I do have horrible rendering glitches that look blocky and weird and awful!
Yes, this happens too. This doesn't happen so much to me, so unfortunately I'm not an expert on avoiding it. It's only been a serious problem for me with one vid which I basically just gritted my way through and finally got a clean render. Using the above technique of rendering in smaller chunks helps. Rebooting your computer or restarting WMM can also help. But ultimately you may just have to keep rerendering until you get a clean sweep. You will get one eventually.
- OMG I render it and it shows up all weird - the bottom half of the screen is a big green line and the vid is all squashed into the top half!
This is one of your codecs being weird. You just need to disable it in WMM. Go to Tools --> Options --> Compatibility and uncheck the codec that's giving you trouble. If you don't know which one it is just...keep trying until you find it, I guess?
I know that DIVX and XVID are frequently culprits.
- ETA an issue I'm experiencing right now and should have remembered to detail! Which is: OMG WMM renders fine until X% and then stops and says that it can't save to the hard drive location and that I should check my source files. WHAT DO I DO?
If the file was rendering fine before, then likely you just have a problem with a single clip. Watch at what per centage the thing fails to render in order to get an idea of what clip. It'll glitch quite badly, perhaps even refuse to play entirely, when you play it back in WMM too. Which will also help identify the issue.
All you need to do is delete that clip, recut it ever so slightly, like, cut it .07 seconds later or earlier or something, and put it back on the timeline. It should work now.
I have no idea why it does this, but it seems that sometimes the clip gets corrupted or something but that it's not reflective of the quality of the source so simply recutting the clip sorts it out? *guesswork*
If the above doesn't work, you can also try rendering the problematic clip on its own as a .wmv file and them reimporting it.
- OMG ASPECT RATIOS WTF?
To a degree, WMM will try and fit whatever you drop into it into its own preset sizes. This usually isn't a perfect fit and you end up with very narrow letterbox lines above and below or to one side of the image. When you use sources with different aspect ratios, this may vary from clip to clip (i.e. one clip may have narrow letterbox lines above and below while the next has a line down the side). If you're a crazy perfectionist like me, you can use source that's all the same size (personally I use 624x352 or 720x408), but the difference is pretty small and a lot of people just leave it. This is something that occurs in other vidding programs too from what I can tell.
When you use WMM effects to pan or zoom, WMM will automatically fill its entire preset screen size, even the letterbox lines that the clips don't occupy. As I said above, the difference is usually small enough that a non-perfectionist won't care, but perfectionists may wish to be aware of this and consider using a source that closely approximates WMM's presets.
This is most likely to be an issue when you are using source which already has significant letterbox lines above and below as suddenly your huge letterbox lines will disappear when you choose to zoom. A few pixels is negligable. An extra third of the size suddenly appearing and disappearing whenever you've chosen to zoom in on part of a shot is pretty obvious. So if you plan on panning or zooming AT ALL with WMM, I highly recomment using source material that's made up only of the image and no letterbox lines.
- OMG the WMM preset I use shows up in the correct aspect ratio in Windows Media Player but shows up warped in all other players!
Yeah, I have no idea why this is. I suspect Microsoft shennanigans. The only way around it is to resize it as another file format. Unfortunately .wmv files don't resize very well. They tend to get jerky or lose quality. I would welcome any technical whizzes explaining either why this is or how you can sort out this issue in a less complex fashion than I've devised, but here's what I do.
1) Convert my .wmv file to .mp4 format using my PSP media converter (I have ImToo PSP Video Converter 3, for the record). I'm not resizing it at this point, just converting it to .mp4 because I can't find a decent way to convert it straight to .avi without it glitching and the program the other program I have hates .wmv files in general. You may be able to complete steps one and two with the same program. If so, let me know which one!
2) Convert my new .mp4 file to .avi and resize it. For this I use MOVAVI Video Suite 3.4.
3) If frame rates confuse you (as they do me) remember that there are two standard frame rates - 25fps and 29.97 (sometimes rounded to 30)fps. If you're using the wrong one that can sometimes cause glitches too, so try the other one if you're in doubt.
3. Cutting, ghost frames & making the most of the effects available.
- Never, ever cut on the first frame after a change of shots. You may well end up with ghost frames. Ghost frames are when - after rendering - you end up with a split second of another shot in your vid where it shouldn't be. WMM is...imprecise and can end up pulling in images from a few frames either side. It's frustrating if you're working with an extremely short shot, but far less frustrating than ending up with ghost frames everywhere. My suggestion is to click the forward button (which moves you .03 seconds ahead) until you've got the first image of the shot you need, then click that button at least once more, preferably twice more (which would put you at most .07 seconds beyond the shot change). Observe this rule at the end of the clip too.
- When you have a clip on the timeline you can just click on the end of the clip and drag it to make it shorter or longer (though never longer than the length you cut it to in the folder view). It will only do this in increments of either .03 or .04 of a second. Usually this is short enough for timing purposes, but if you specifically need a clip to be a certain length to the decisecond (or whatever they're called) you'll have to actually cut it to that length before dropping it on the timeline.
I usually make clips longer than I think I'll need just because then I have the freedom to shorten or lengthen it as needed without having to recut it every time.
- If you drop a clip onto the timeline, then click on it and drag it over the prior clip, you will get an automatic crossfade. I know this is probably an obvious one but it did take me a couple of tries to find out (then again, I was basically effects-phobic for my first few vids so I'm sure my learning curve was kind of ridiculous in that area). The benefit to this - quite aside from not having to click into the transitions section every time you want a crossfade - is that by dragging you can specify the length of your fade without the ridiculously imprecise "Transition Length" option that only lets you start at .25 and then increase by quarter second increments.
While all other transitions required you to actually select them from the transitions folder, they can be similarly modified in terms of length by dragging.
- Effects can be added to the clip by right-clicking on it and then clicking on "effects". It'll bring up a little window where you can select all the effects you want at once from a menu rather than dragging each one onto the clip from the effects folder each time.
- Random Effect Tip #1: Remember that you can turn continuous footage into several effects. I mean, that's really obvious technically but it's something that people don't always immediately think of. So for instance, I have a clip of someone walking from point A to point B and it takes 3 seconds I can turn that into three clips - 0.00 - 1.23 seconds, 1.24 - 2.44 seconds and 2.45 - 3.00 seconds, even though it'll look identical to using a single, continuous clip.
Then WHY, I hear you ask, would one do such a thing?
Because then you can add different effects to different sections of the clip. It's mainly useful for time-toggles. So for example, in the above instance, I could speed up the first clip, slow down the second and leave the third as normal. Now instead of someone walking from A to B at normal speed I have someone walking very quickly, suddenly going into slo-mo, then speeding up a little. But it's still part of a the same fluid piece of footage. That would be a very obvious time-toggle.
But it can also be useful if your clip is too short for your intended purpose, like you have a 1.00 second clip that needs to be 1.20 seconds long. You can slow just the last part of the clip, or just a second in the middle where people are staying still anyway, and it can look pretty invisible. The reverse being that you can speed up parts of the clip in order to fit more of the action into a shorter time-frame without having to make everyone look like they're part of some crazy animation sequence.
(Note: beware native camera movement as this can be a dead giveaway to speeding up/slowing down footage even if the actors are still).
- Random Effect Tip #2: This is an extension of Random Effect Tip #1. If you don't just cut up a continuous piece of footage into numerous clips but actually overlap those clips' timestamps, you can fade in and out of the same clip 'invisibly'.
So again, example, I have a three second long clip. I cut it into three clips.
Clip 1: 0.00 - 1.50
Clip 2: 1.00 - 2.50
Clip 3: 2.00 - 3.00
As you can see, there's 0.50 seconds of overlap between the clips (and yes, doing this means you need to create clip one, drop it on the timeline, then rejoin clip one to the rest of the clip up in the 'folder' section of WMM and recut at the earlier time to make clip two, drop that on the timeline, then repeat. It's time consuming; much about tricking WMM into giving you better effects is, sadly).
So if I put a 0.50 crossfade in between each clip, then the footage that they're fading between is identical. So the fade is totally invisible.
Again, the benefit of this isn't apparent until you start using effects. So if put grayscale effects on Clip 1 and Clip 3, but not Clip 2, you'd see it running in grayscale between 0.00 and 1.00, fading into colour between 1.00 and 1.50, in colour between 1.50 and 2.00, fading into grayscale between 2.00 and 2.50 and then in grayscale between 2.50 and 3.00.
...I hope that wasn't too confusing. It's a great technique but a difficult one to explain rather than show. :(
4. Custom effects.
- Custom effects are available for WMM. Custom effects for WMM Vista will not work with WMM XP and vice versa, so be aware of what you're downloading. There are custom effects for bluescreening, for overlays, for negative images, for colour passes (though the ones I have aren't great sadly), for hue changes, for warming or cooling the colours of footage, for making those "glowy" type clip transitions; all kinds. Most of the better ones come with their own installers so you don't need to know too much about how to install them. Though even the ones that don't are usually as simple as creating a new folder in your WMM program files folder and dropping a file into it.
- Start with Rehan's Shader TFX package. It's a two week trial with only limited functionality after that if you don't pay a fee for it, but it's worth downloading anyway because the limited functionality includes nifty stuff like bluescreening, picture-in-picture and some other good stuff, and also because a fair few other custom effects need you to have the free version of this installed in order to work. There's also a bunch more stuff on that site both free and not-free for WMM. It's probably the highest profile place to go for custom effects.
http://www.rehanfx.org/shader.htm
- Another site I recommend is Blaine's WMM blog where you can get some really good effects including the one I use for overlays.
http://movies.blainesville.com/search/label/custom
- Finally if you've really got the custom effects bug, this forum will furnish you with more and can probably provide you with much more help than I can if you want to go down the road of creating your own custom effects with XML. I wouldn't have the first idea about doing that!
http://www.windowsmoviemakers.net/Forums/ShowForum.aspx?&ForumID=33
- I know of no way to make WMM play clips in reverse. Sorry. I think that not even Rehan has that sorted yet. In the meantime, should you feel the need, I have heard that this freeware program is good, though I have no personal experience with it.
http://www.xander.free.fr/info/Time_Reversal/index_en.html
And...I think that's it?
Any questions? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-11-12 03:56 pm (UTC)I'm finishing up my fourth WMM vid and the one thing about this program is that it's a new experience every time. First vid it crashed like a mofo. Second vid had a little crashing but tons of pixellation issues. Third vid was very short and was technically free of issues!!! Fourth vid it's been sluggish and playback is super jumpy (restarting seemed to help that a bit).
One problem I've encountered more than once is WMM not liking the song mp3s that I choose and doing some sort of fancy alchemy to make a 3 minute song appear like it's 20 minutes long when I pull into the audio timeline. It doesn't actually change the way the song plays (still sounds normal) but it prevents me from going to any one point in the timeline and playing from there. Instead audio starts at the beginning or just another point that should not be the audio to match up with that clip. (Hard to explain but if anyone else reading this has this problem feel free to email me). Thankfully the solution for me has been to convert the mp3 to a wav file which WMM enjoys much more.
By the way, Becka I just posted an aspect ratio (sorta) question on the vidding comm. It's about stripping out letterboxing on a source clip. I might email you about it separately later to see if you'll take pity on my non tech-savvy ass and convert the clip for me in exchange for a fic or vid or whatever you like. :)
no subject
Date: 2008-11-12 04:02 pm (UTC)Yeah, sluggish playback is something I have no workaround for (though yes, restarting will occasionally help). Basically I tend to vid by only asking the program to playback the last few seconds of the vid at a time to check the timings of it and then I re-render frequently to check how the whole thing hangs.
Also, yeah, I've had that problem with some .mp3 files too - see, already comments are helping make this post more useful!
And as you've correctly identified, the easiest way around it is to convert the .mp3 to either .wmv or .wma format. I prefer .wma because it's a) smaller and b) you can do it in WMM itself. Just drop the song on the timeline, and render it with no clips and it'll render as an audio file instead of a video file.
Random tip: you can also put video files in the audio track and it's just play the soundtrack to them. Handy if you ever want to put some of the clip audio in the soundtrack, etc.
I will check out your post on the vidding comm in a bit (I gotta go to bed right now!) but if it's just one or two clips, I can do that for you no problem. It won't take me long and I don't mind. :)
no subject
Date: 2008-11-12 04:25 pm (UTC)I'm actually going to experiment with using some audio clips in this vid actually. Just very short repetitions of a phrase that is actually the song title. (So What? by Pink...Starbuck's a fan of that phrase too.)
Re: the Faith clip. The very lovely
no subject
Date: 2008-11-12 04:35 pm (UTC)With the audio the only thing I would warn about is the background noise. You won't just be putting in the lines of dialogue but also all the ambiant noise and background music of whoever is saying "so what" at the time. I've only used VO stuff like...once because ever other time that sort of...wrecked the ambiance, I thought.
I mean, you should totally experiment and go for it and I love the concept! But it's just WMM. You can't frak with the audio to up the treble and dampen the bass or whatever you'd need to do. Plus in the audio you're fading in and out not overlaying so you'll end up with a rising and dropping of volume possibly at the expense of the song's coherence.
If you can find a freeware audio editing program it might be better to use?
...says she who is a self-confessed avoider of trying to do such things, and therefore is in no position to offer advice on VO-ing. ;)
no subject
Date: 2008-11-12 05:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-11-12 04:51 pm (UTC)I had two frustrating problems with my first two vids. One was a WMM issue and the other wasn't. The first problem was in the middle of my vid, WMM simply wouldn't use a fade transition. Just wouldn't do it. I was like forty clips in or something and there needed to be a fade there. Grrr. So I googled it and through trial and error discovered if I recreated the whole file again it would work. But I was about 3 or 4 minutes into the vid for that. What I ended up doing was using my backup file. WMM does't really crash with me. But I always expected it to. So I tediously make two of the same exact files while vidding. The present one decided, sorry two much fiddling with me! But I was able to use the backup one that just had clips and no transitions yet. It was very frustrating to be putting finishing touches on a vid and it just won't use an effect you think you need. Sometimes I just stop messing with my vid because WMM gets so stubborn on me.
The second frustrating thing wasn't WMM at all. It was probably a codec thing. I usually just keep playing around until I find a file (or my friend makes one) that WMM likes. I don't create the files from DVDs. Not ready for that yet. Anyway, I found a deleted scene on YouTube I wanted to use. Not available on DVD because SciFi is crazy like that. I could not get anything but the first 30 seconds of this scene (a Flash scene) to play in WMM. I could import it in, but 30 seconds and then . . . black. :-( I really needed this scene but after days of me and my friend trying to figure this out, and a deadline looming, I had to give it up. It was very, very sad. I actually did download some program that said it could turn a Flash file in to an avi and did, but the avi still wouldn't work.
I've learned not to get my heart set on something because when I get to vidding, because WMM might not let me use do I want. It's forced me to be more creative, I can tell you that.
Thanks for these tips. Especially when you say, "ARCANE WMM MACHINATIONS". It's good to know when the program is just plain crazy.
no subject
Date: 2008-11-12 04:57 pm (UTC)Do you ever put credits at the beginning? Just wondering. And if you do, do you make the credits before you make the vid? Another thing is in my second vid, my credits (beginning and ending) doubled my vid by half! Actually more than half. My final edit was about 20,000 KB. With credits? 59,000 KB. I swear that's all I added. What's up with that?
I'd love to know your thoughts about credits and WMM. I am going to make a post on vid credits soon, and I've noticed you've been more creative with yours lately.
Thanks for being the, "Ask Becka" of WMM. :-)
no subject
Date: 2008-11-14 12:29 pm (UTC)Re: credits, generally I put them at the end. I don't like the WMM presets so much because they're so long and as you note, can expand the size of the vid (though never that much for me, that's so weird - did you choose to render at a different preset - higher quality or something?)
And the credits will only let you shrink them down to a certain minimum size.
BUT LOOK, MOAR TIPS!
If you drag the credits into the actual video timeline as opposed to the credits/titles timeline, you can add effects to them just like any other clip, including speeding them up. So if you want them to scroll faster, or fade in and out more quickly, that's what I do.
In general, though, I make my credits in Paint (yes, Pain, I am a luddite clearly) as very simple .bmp files then import them and drop them on the timeline. The preset for how long image files play is amendable under the WMM options menu, but there's no need since you can just click on the right-hand edge of the "clip" and drag it to be as long or as short as you need.
Also, (you probably already know this), but when you put the credits onto the credits/titles track, it overlays onto whatever clips are currently showing. So if you just put a black background (I have a totally black .bmp file which I often use when I just want a plain black background to fade in and out of), or whatever colour you want for your credits, you don't have to worry about placeholder clips. It's not a placeholder clip, it's just your credits without the words overlayed yet. :)
Also as you noticed, yes, I have started being more creative with mine, though entertainingly (at least to me), it's more a case of necessity driving me to creativity than intention?
On two previous occasions I used the credits kind of in-universe (there's a war going on for your mind, laura is framed as a note from the hybrid, and The Book of Kara's credits are framed as if it's an in-universe vid). But they were still basically black-and-white frames at the end of the vid.
In Traditional Cylon Lullaby I actually used the credits the way I did because I was worried about the length of the thing. I really wanted it under two minutes, and I also wanted to use those clips of Boomer humming to the Raider as the intro and then Athena humming the same song to Hera as the extro, so I decided to try and use those clips as backgrounds for the credits. So it was mostly a case of worrying about the time and then trying to look at that as an opportunity?
The credits for I Want to be Evil are similarly born of necessity (even though I really like the end result and am glad I was driven to it.)
Basically that vid was originally only the stuff after the credits, but my beta said she really thought that it needed some of the intro to set up the change of tone and cut me version of the song (one thing I am bad at is cutting down songs if it requires splicing sections together, so I'm at other people's mercy for that currently). So I remade it. But I was seriously low on footage. I mean, I love Tory but she ain't around that much.
So I thought I'd use bridge between the sections as the credits: I think this may have been a suggestion from my beta, actually? All hail the might
Essentially it was a trick to get away with using less footage but I think the end result is a really great bridge between the sections? I hope it doesn't come off as cheap anyway!
no subject
Date: 2008-11-12 09:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-11-14 12:15 pm (UTC)You're like this famous graphic designer guy who...
Date: 2008-11-13 06:54 pm (UTC)(Yes, the Great Beccatoria LJ Catch-up has begun. It will probably be slow, though, because, basically, the thesis situation is still a nightmare.)
Re: You're like this famous graphic designer guy who...
Date: 2008-11-14 12:30 pm (UTC)(And I always love getting comments from you, but also as always, no pressure; it takes as long as it takes and I hope that your thesis situation improves somehow. *sending hugs and virtual Green & Black's Almond Chocolate*
no subject
Date: 2008-11-17 05:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-11-24 12:13 pm (UTC)That's awesome that you're teaching your roommate about vidding! I hope that she gets on well with it and that WMM doesn't kill her too badly! I also hope that this post does end up being helpful to you.
Thanks for the comment! :D
no subject
Date: 2008-11-24 01:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-11-24 12:08 pm (UTC)Also I really do encourage you to give your own vids a try. Yes, the program is frustrating, but as you get more of a handle on it, it becomes less so. At least, that's how it works for me. :)