back a page forward a page

• Tools used

• VirtualDub v1.6.16
• XVID v1.1
• Audacity v1.2.4b
• The GIMP for Windows v2.2.13
• AviTricks Classic v1.64

Do you own a digital still camera that doubles as a low res digital video camera?

Is your hard drive filling up with 30 second clips of your kids, dog, girlfriend/boyfriend or car?

Want to make those clips watchable, but don't want to fork out thousands for professional non-linear video editing software (or hundreds on restrictive "user friendly" crap)?

Never fear, for, as is usually the case, you can do it all with freeware.

During this tutorial I'll be using video and images of my son taken on my Fuji Finepix s5500 and setting them to music using nothing but freeware applications on a Windows XP machine. We'll also chuck in some titles and basic effects for good measure.

It will be kept short so as to be used for emailing relatives who don't get to see the little munchkin all that often and therefore should be under 5MB in size. Short clips are also far more likely to hold a person's attention.

I will be breaking the process into three parts:

• Part 1: Collecting the media - Using VirtualDub we'll do some basic editing of our clips, removing the sound and encoding them to a format the editing software will understand. We'll also use VirtualDub to capture a few sound snippets. And finally we'll use GIMP for Windows to prepare our images.
• Part 2: Creating a soundtrack - We'll use Audacity to touch up our audio clips, edit the music, and fit the audio clips to the music.
• Part 3: Editing the video - Finally we'll be using AviTricks Classic to create the final piece.

Before we begin the tutorial I'd just like to say a big thankyou to the Open Source communities that have created and refined VirtualDub, Audacity and GIMP; and Bobyte Software, creators of AviTricks Classic. You guys are truly revolutionary.

Part 1: Collecting the Media

Before we start create a folder somewhere on your computer with the name of the project followed by _scratch (in my case aiden@2_scratch) somewhere in my computer and create the following folder tree

Now, if you have more than one physical hard drive, go to a different one (prefferably on a different channel if you have IDE drives) and create a folder with the name of the project. This will be the folder we store all our edited files. Having them on seperate drives speeds up the process of encoding. Under that create a folder called unedited video, and copy all the clips you want to use in the project into here. If you don't have more than one hard drive just ignore this and store everything in one folder.

collecting video

Most digital still camera's use proprietry formats to record video. Wether MPEG, Apple's mov format or some other format. Rarely do they record to Windows avi format. And even some of those that do (like my Fuji Finepix S-5500) use a proprietry codec, which you need to purchase to be able decode them properly for editing, and the shareware trials make a watermark on all video's (even on playback) until they're uninstalled.

For every problem there is a powerful free solution, and in this case it's VirtualDub, a small program for encoding video to avi formats. Virtualdub also let's you trim your video and add filters and effects via plugins. VirtualDub was created by programmer Avery Lee in college and has since been developed and modified by the Open Source community.

Unfortunately, if your camera uses Apple's mov format, VirtualDub won't work for you. VirtualDub used to support mov, but as mov is a proprietry format, Apple made them remove support. To convert your mov files to avi's use Rad Video Tools and follow this tutorial.

We'll be using VirtualDub to encode our video's into a format AviTricks can understand and do some basic edits. So download VirtualDub from here. You don't need to install VirtualDub, just use your favourite compression program and unzip it to a folder. Go into that folder and open virtualdub.exe to run the program (might be an idea to send a shortcut to your desktop). Once you have VirtualDub open, hit Ctrl+S to open a file, browse to your unedited video directory and open one of the files.

First, we'll create the settings for our project. Go to the Video menu and ensure Full Processing Mode is checked. If it's not click on it to check it.

Now go to Video-Compression. This is where we choose the codec we'll be using to compress our videos. In keeping with the freeware nature of the tutorial, we'll be using XVID, a powerful, Open Source codec available here.

Once you've downloaded and installed XVID select it as your codec and click on the Configure button. Now you'll be presented with the XVID configuration window. The default settings should use the Target Quantizer method at a compression rate of 4, change this rate to 1 for maximum quality. Keep all other settings the same. Settings should remain the same for the remainder of the project, but you'll have to reset them if you start another session of VirtualDub.

Now play your clip by pressing the Space Bar or clicking on the Play button. You're looking for short clips (5-20 seconds in length) with lots of movement (in the subject not the camera). Pans and zooms are generally only ever used for setup and closure, and I'll be using images and sounds for this. The camera should only move to keep the subject in shot. Also listen out for any interesting audio you may want.

Once you've found the movement you want, use the progress slider and the left and right arrow keys (which advance the video forward and back one frame respectively) to locate the beginning of the movement. Press the "Home" key or click on to mark the in point of your video. Now find the end of the movement and press the "End" key or click on to mark the out point of your video. The video to your left is an example of a good clip. It captures the movement from beggining to end. Keep your clips short. Making two or three short clips from one long clip is good practise, especially if the camera is on different angles as these will make great cut shots.

If you have videos of different resolution, you should resize them all to a uniform resolution now. First decide your project resolution. I'll be using 320*240 as that is the size of my video clips. You'll probably want to use the resolution of the majority of your clips. We can use a filter in VirtualDub to resize any clips that need. Go to Video-Filtersand click Add.... Select Resize on the popup window and click OK. Now enter the new resolution of your video on the final popup and click OK. Ensure the new filter is selected and click OK on the filters menu.

Now, we'll save our clip. We'll capture the audio seperately, so go to Audio and click on No Audio to save only the video. Next press F7 to save the file as a Windows avi. Save the file in the Video folder of your scratch disk, giving it a name that will allow for easy recognition (a description of the action perhaps). Finally go to Audio and click on Direct Stream Copy to turn the audio back on for the next clip.

Do this for all the video files you wish to use.

collecting audio

Remember how I told you to keep an ear out for interesting sounds? Well now we're going to save those sounds to be edited into our soundtrack.

The thing about the audio on these camera's is that it leaves much to be desired and usually consists mostly of the camera operator trying to get someone to look at the camera. So I'll only be using three audio clips. Two for setup and one at the end, and we'll have to clean them up a little. We'll do that when we create our soundtrack.

We'll be using VirtualDub to collect our audio as well. It is much the same process as collecting the video: find the beggining of the sound, mark an in point; find the end of the sound, mark an out point (if you have no audio in VirtualDub it's because you still have No Audio selected, so change it back to Direct Stream Copy). Deliberately save a little more of the audio than you'll be using as it may come in handy in editing.

To save our audio file we go to File-Save WAV, and save it in the audio directory in our scratch disk, once again giving it a meaningful name.

collecting images

We'll be using the powerful, Open Source, the G.I.M.P (GNU Image Manipulation Project) for Windows to prepare our images. Download and install first the required GDK+ Runtime files from here and then the automated installer for GIMP from here. Once that's done open GIMP.

If you've used commercial image editor's (or if you haven't), GIMPs interface may look wierd. Gimp uses seperate windows for the image and interface. Once you get used to it, it is not at all hard to use. We'll only be using the GIMP to crop and scale our images for use in the video. If you want to do more advanced editing in GIMP, check out some of the tutorials here

Hit Ctrl+O to open your image. You'll need some idea of what you are going to do with the image. I'll be panning and zooming on one image I'll be using as underlay for my opening title, and a number of other images I'll be scrolling horizontally across the screen towards the end.

First we'll crop our image to just the action. Select the crop tool and drag over the area of the image you want. A small window labelled "Crop and Resize" would have popped up giving you the co-ordinates of your crop (try to keep the image around 4:3 dimesions unless you'll be using a zoom or pan effect on it). When you are happy with your selection, hit enter to complete the crop.

Now we're going to scale the image. For this you need to know what the image will be used for. Images that will be zoomed should be larger than the project resolution. How much larger depends on how much you are going to zoom. Images that won't be zoomed should be the same size as the project resolution.

Select the scale tool and click on your image. Enter the resolution you want your image at and hit enter or click Scale.

Finally press Ctrl+S and save your file in the images directory on your scratch disk, once again giving it a meaningful name.