Make a Video-Like Snippet to Begin a Photo Story

Photo Story can't use video clips as source files, and running your stories through Movie Maker requires a re-rendering that reduces the quality of the finished file, and increases its file size considerably. What can you do? Let's explore making a quasi-video-like snippet within the story.

Here's a short 20 second PhotoStory 3 story that includes a video-like snippet: Sample Snippet

We usually make videos from still pix, but in this tutorial we'll make still pix from a video and use them in Photo Story to make them look again like a video. The sample snippet uses 17 still pictures and plays them about 3 frames per second to get as close as possible to a video clip in a story. And it works fine if you're willing to accept the much reduced frame rate that makes the approach feasible.

 What's Happening? 

•  I started posting a 'tip-of-the-day' on the Movie Maker newsgroup. So many posts start with a problem; it reminds me of the early complexion of my website as a 'problem-solving' one. I've been working toward having the fun and excitement of making home movies outweigh, or at least balance, the gray cloud that sometimes comes from being steeped in problems.

I'm only a few days into it, but it's doing what I had hoped, opening a door to some healthy discussions about Movie Maker features and capabilities.  

• My laptop has the Panasonic DV-AVI codec on it, in addition to the Microsoft codec. I've been experimenting lately by using it as my choice of compression codec when saving AVI files from TMPGEnc and VirtualDub. I find that it compresses fairly quickly, the files are about identical in size to the DV-AVI files from MM1 and 2 (as you would expect... the files have to meet the established spec), and the new files work fine in Movie Maker.

The Microsoft DV codec isn't in the list of choices when saving files from those apps. By using the Panasonic codec I can maintain the original quality of the input DV-AVI files while picking up the  value of the app. I ran about 14 GB of video through VirtualDub the other day just to use that brightness (Levels) adjustment feature we covered a couple weeks ago. Starting with type II files from Movie Maker 1 and rendering the new file with the Panasonic codec, the video and audio went through the process fine and the clips look much better than anything I could do in Movie Maker (or Premiere).

 Plan the Snippet

Train Clip - the engine of an old steam driven train can be a great opening clip to start a vacation story...

I have a documentary about the Civil War that I downloaded from the Internet Archives, a video that starts with an approaching mid-19th century steam train. Right after the title frames finish, the locomotive is there, with good audio to go with it.

The downloaded file is an MPEG-1, which works in Movie Maker but not in Photo Story. I'll use TMPGEnc 2.5+ to extract the frames as jpg files and the audio as a WAV file... then select some frames and put them into Photo Story 3 as a video-like snippet. I had done this before with a sunset, but speeding it up considerably in the story. This is the first time I've tried to simulate the real-time playing of a video in a story.

 Extract Frames as Still Pix from the Video...

I started by dragging and dropping the video from my library folder into TMPGEnc.. a single drag and drop using my file manager into the lower left of this window gets all the entry fields automatically filled in.

To extract the frames as still pictures, use the pull-down menu > File > Output to file > Sequence >

I opted for JPG files at 80% quality... that'll keep the set of frames at a reasonably small total file size.

When you press the Save button, the frames are extracted and automatically numbered from 0000000 to wherever you stop or it ends. 

I knew the short scene I wanted came right after the opening title frames so I started it off from the beginning. When the scene I wanted had finished going by in the preview monitor, I aborted the extraction.

Canceling the process at any point in the extraction process leaves you with the set of images created so far. I had 1,079 images in the folder when it was a few percent into the video.

Check the set of pix - In IrfanView, you can do a quick scan of them in almost a real time video way... sort them in file name order, open the first one in IrfanView, and use your mouse wheel. They'll pass by as quickly as you can spin the wheel. I quickly went to the first frame after the titling passed and noted it was #0000713. I had 366 frames to work with. That was plenty. 

I deleted the images in the folder from 000 to 712 and kept going.

It's time to open Photo Story 3 and take a cut at making the short story with the video-like snippet.

It's time to do a little work in PS3... the steps I took were:

Opt to remove the black borders from all the pix.

Save the project file before I forget.

Next, Next a couple times to get to the window where you customize the motion.

For each image, check 'specify start and end position', check the two options to set the start and end positions the same as the previous end, and the same as the start, opt to set the number of seconds to display the picture yourself.... setting it to 0.3 seconds (about 10% faster than 3 frames per second). Do this for each picture - 17 times.

Add the background audio, the train audio file...

 Closing

 I thought it worked well enough... if it hadn't I might have changed the subject of this newsletter, or bit the bullet and doubled the number of frames being used.

I look forward to comments and discussion about this and other newsletters on the forums at: Windows Movie Makers.net

Movie Maker 2 and Photo Story 3 - www.papajohn.org
Photo Story 2 - www.photostory.papajohn.org