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Have you long harbored the urge to make your own film? You pick the subject from your kid’s kindergarten graduation to a science fiction action flick worthy of Arnold himself. You edit your footage, add professional-looking transitions and special effects, and even set the mood with a custom soundtrack recorded on your aunt’s antique Hammond organ. Ladies and gentlemen, this is the definition of sweet and it’s all made possible by your PC. (For the full effect, buy a canvas director’s chair and a megaphone.) In this article, I demonstrate how you can use footage from your digital video (DV) camcorder or, with the right equipment, even the footage that you’ve recorded on tape to produce your own film. Your finished work of visual art can be saved to a CD-R or DVD-R or stored on your hard drive for use on your Web pages.
Getting the Lowdown on ArcSoft’s ShowBiz
My filmmaking tool of choice is ShowBiz, which is a popular, entry-level $79 video editor from ArcSoft (www.arcsoft.com). ShowBiz has far more features than Windows Movie Maker (which ships with Windows XP Home and Professional Editions), and I find it easier to use. The program runs on Windows 98 SE/Me/2000, too. After you install ShowBiz, you can run it from the Start menu by choosing Start -> All Programs -> ArcSoft -> ShowBiz.
Take a moment to examine the ShowBiz main window, and you see the four major controls that you use to edit movies:
- Media library: Consider this collection your treasure chest of things that you can add to your film. Movies can contain any mix of items from these four categories: media (includes video clips, still images, and audio), transitions (effects that occur between the clips and images), special effects, and text.
- Player window: It sounds self-explanatory, and (for a change) it actually is. The Player window allows you to play back and view your movie within ShowBiz while you’re working on it.
- Storyboard strip: If you’re familiar with the concept of storyboarding in cinematography where sketches of scenes are arranged to create a paper mock-up of the film you’ve probably already guessed that you use this strip to add items from the Media library list. And you’d be right. These media clips, audio clips, and effects are the building blocks of your finished movie.
- Timeline strip: Click the Timeline tab at the top of the Storyboard strip, and voilà! you switch to the Timeline strip, where you can trim or expand the length of effects and transitions. The Timeline strip is also the control that you use to add and edit the soundtrack for your movie.
Rounding Up Clips and Images
A video editor like ShowBiz allows you to use raw footage, or video clips, transferred to your hard drive from a DV camcorder (or downloaded from the Web, or taken from a royalty-free video clip collection). You can also import digital photographs and use them anywhere you like within your movie even directly from your scanner or your digital camera. However, throwing together a hodgepodge of unorganized clips is (to say the least) not particularly creative or satisfying. (Imagine trying to build Star Wars by using clips from Gone With the Wind, and you’ll see what I mean.) Before you build your first work of cinematic art, you must import your own video and still images into one or more albums, which is the name that ShowBiz gives to each of those tabbed sections within your Media library. Each item in an album is actually a link to a file on your hard drive. To import video clips or images that are saved to your hard drive, follow these steps:
1. Click the Media tab at the top of the Media library.
2. Click the Add button that appears under the list (which, strangely enough, bears a book with an arrow).
3. From the Open dialog box that appears, navigate to the location of the video, photograph, or sound effect that you want to add, click the file name to select it, and then click the Open button.
4. Click New Album in the drop-down list or click an existing album to import into an existing album. You can create a new album ShowBiz won’t allow you to add items to the Sample album, which contains preloaded ShowBiz clips or add the item to an existing album using the oddly unnamed drop-down list box located beneath the library tabs. Some types of media albums have advanced settings for the items that they contain; if you’re presented with a dialog box like this, you can make any changes you like or simply click OK to keep the current settings. ShowBiz displays the new album (if you created one) or adds the item to the existing album that you chose. To display thumbnails of album items, click the Album view mode button at the upper-right of the Media library. This toggles the thumbnail feature on and off. To rename an album, click the album name to select it, type a new name in the drop-down list box, and then press Enter. ShowBiz allows you to sort an album in many different ways, such as by size or date. Just click the Sort button (which sports a capital A and Z conjoined with an arrow), choose the desired sort order, and then click OK. Sorting makes it easier to locate a specific item in an overstuffed album. Besides the method I describe earlier, here are three other easy ways to import items:
- By downloading them: ArcSoft offers registered users the opportunity to download new media items from the ArcSoft Web site. These freebies include new transitions, still images, audio clips, and sample video clips.
- By capturing video and audio: If you have a video capture board or a FireWire port on your PC, you can capture video from your VCR or camcorder. Hook up your video source, click the Capture button in the Movie section of the ShowBiz window, and then click the Record button (the button with the red dot) to save the video (or just the audio component) to a new album within the library. (For information on connecting your video hardware, refer to the user manual for your video capture card and camcorder.)
- By acquiring images from your scanner or camera: If your scanner or digital camera is TWAIN compatible and just about every decent model is connect your hardware and then click the Acquire button (which bears a tiny digital camera and scanner) to import items directly. ShowBiz will prompt you to select the image source from the available TWAINcompatible hardware devices. Again, the process varies according to the hardware that you’re using, but if you’re experienced with scanning or downloading images, you’ll be in familiar waters.
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