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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?
