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Satires and Parodies of Amway/Quixtar on youtube.com |
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creative juices are flowing these days on youtube.com. If you care to wade
through the dozens of Amway company promotion videos and Amway company made videos on
youtube.com you will occasionally stumble across a real "home made" video,
for which the youtube service was actually made. After the start of the Quixtar civil war there has been an
increase in the number of home made videos about Quixtar put up on youtube.com. Here
are a few I have seen. The XS man videos are cute.
HAM calls
Michael Mohr at Alticor To the chagrin if Amway, anybody with a computer using Microsoft XP can now easily make their own music slide shows and paste together videos with the "Microsoft Movie Maker program". The program is not perfect but it does allow one a simple and easy start into computer video editing. I have since upgraded to Pinnacle Studioplus 10 , which costs about $100. Here are some of the things I have found with the two programs. Microsoft Movie Maker The main benefit of this program is that it is free. Besides allowing you to make simple videos, I think the second function of this program is to crash and hang every five minutes on your computer. It can definitely test your patience. You can minimize the amount of crashes by not movie around the program too fast, and by having plenty of hard drive and memory space. I found I had fewer crashes when I turned off the "auto save" feature in the program. When you do this remember to save your work often or you will find you have to redo scenes after the program crashes. The program has a simple zoom feature, straight in and straight out. You can insert still photos and video clips (.mwv, mpg type) into a timeline and build your video along the timeline. In the timeline you can drag and drop music or sound files. On the sound bar there is an sound wave form so it is easy to match scenes to transitions in the music. The program also has a few simple scene blending features and fade in and fade out and you can also modify the brightness or contrast of pictures. The program allows you control the size of the finished video either by specifying a desired size in megabytes, the video size with the sampling rate. I made first to mtn bike trip videos (Trans Alp 2, Trans Alp 1) with MS movie maker. Basically the program is good for the beginner. If you want to do more advanced features like pan and zoom, subtitles, then a better program is required.
Pinnacle Studio Plus 10 After seeing this backpacking video from John Sanders, which I just ramdomly came across a long time ago on the Internet, I knew I had to get a better software package. After comparing packages for about an 1/2 hr in Best Buy I decided to buy the Pinnacle Studio Plus software. The software does everything Movie maker does plus a lot more. The package said it would do pans, zooms, subtitles, as well as scrolling text. Those were my minimum requirements for the software. The program has a few bugs and with experience you will find out what not to do to keep it from crashing. I found the program loves to crash when you do a lot of title work, especially with long scrolling text. It is best to keep scrolling text short and sweet and not at the very beginning of a video. As with MS movie maker, I turned off the "auto save" feature to help prevent crashes. Sometimes it is good to turn of the "background rendering" feature as well. You can turn it back on to preview the special feature of your video when you want to see them. The pinnacle package will take at least 3 Gig space on your hard drive including the optional installations. You will need some of the "option" installations to make the program even work, so it is best to just install everything. When you work with this program you will need LOTS of hard drive space. Just buy a 300-500 gig external drive and do all your work on that. Just set the working directory to your external drive and you should be ok. I'm working with a 2.3 gig Hz Celeron laptop with 1 gig RAM. That seems to work out pretty good but the graphics card in the laptop is probably not the best for the program. Studio Plus 10 will allow you to pan around and zoom in and out of an still image, giving you the effect of having actual video. If you have a large digital photo you can start in one corner and move across the photo to another position zooming while you go. With this possibility you will probably want to shoot your digital photos, especially landscapes with the highest resolution your camera has. It will give you more flexibility and options when making a movie. Studio plus will allow you to do picture-in-picture scenes or even video-in-video work. The preview feature for these special effects, at least on my computer do not work well, so you end having to guess where things should go, make a short clip in see how it looks. This might have something to do with my graphics card. As far as I have found, Studio does not allow you to do special effects on your titles and text such as fades and transitions. For a hobby movie maker the Pinnacle Studioplus 10 will do most anything you want to do. With either programs it is relatively easy for anyone to take those vacation photos and paste them altogether in a more interesting package than just displaying the photos alone. For slideshow videos containing just still photos, I suggest saving in the Microsoft .wmv format. It appears that the .wmv format has an compression routine optimized for still images. The .wmv format files size seems to be less dependent upon time than it does on the number of different frames contained in a video. A video with pans and zooms through still pictures will take up more file space than a video with stationary pictures with the .mwv format. I've saved slide show videos in both .wmv format and .mpg format and have seen the file size grow by a factor of 6 when saved in .mpg format. |
