Previewing Your Movie

I could start and end this section by simply saying “Click Play” under the preview window in your editing program. If you want to see a bigger preview in Apple iMovie, click the Play Movie Fullscreen button. If you are using Pinnacle Studio, alas, you are limited to the tiny, inflexible size of the Studio preview window.
Of course, truly previewing a movie means a whole lot more than just clicking the Play button. To perform a truly effective preview, you must

• Draw a properly critical eye on the movie.
• Decide whether just previewing the movie on your computer screen is sufficient, or whether you need to preview it on a TV monitor. The next two sections address both of these subjects.

Warm up that coffee, sit back in your director’s chair, and get ready to see what kind of movie magic you hath wrought.
You should also make sure that you preview your movie on the same type of equipment that your audience will use. This includes testing it in the player software that your audience will use if you plan to share your movie on the Internet or a recordable CD.

Freezing Frames from Video

The first part of this chapter shows you how to use still pictures in your movies. But there will also be times when you might want to freeze a video image for posterity, so to speak. You may want to grab still pictures from video to help promote your movie, or you may want a still image of someone or something, and the video clip is the only image you have. Just keep in mind that the resolution of video images is really, really low compared to even the cheapest digital cameras, so frame grabs from video will have a lower quality. The lower quality will be especially apparent if you print the frame grab because image details will look blocky and pixelated. To freeze a frame of video and turn it into a still picture:

1. Open the video clip that has the frame that you want to freeze. If you don’t have a video clip of your own, you can use the sample video clip on the companion CD-ROM. In Pinnacle Studio, you must place the clip in the timeline before you can freeze a frame. To add a video clip to the timeline, simply drag it from the album to the timeline.
2. Move the play head to the frame that you want to freeze.
3. Grab the frame. In Apple iMovie, choose File➪Save Frame As. A Save As dialog box appears. In Pinnacle Studio, choose Toolbox➪Grab Video Frame. The Grab Video Frame toolbox appears. Choose the Movie radio button next to Grab From, click the Grab button, and then click Save to Disk.
4. Save the frame. In iMovie, name the picture and choose a format in the Format menu. The available formats are JPEG and PICT, but if you’re not sure which format to choose, I recommend JPEG.

In Studio, name the file and choose a format from the Save As Type menu. Several formats are available, but I recommend the JPEG format for the greatest versatility.
After you have grabbed a frame of video, you can use the image on a Web page to promote your movie, use it as a background image for a DVD menu, or share it as you would any other still photo.

Making an overlay graphic

Pinnacle Studio treats still graphics as if they were titles. As explained, you can put titles in either the video track or the title track of the timeline. If you put a title in the video track, it will be a full-screen title. If you put the title in the title track, it will be an overlay title, which means the words will appear over a video image.
Because Studio treats still photos like titles, you can use the title track to overlay your own custom graphics over a video image. To try it, follow these steps:

1. Open Microsoft Paint by choosing Start➪All Programs➪Accessories➪Paint.
2. In Paint, choose Image➪Attributes. The Attributes dialog box opens.
3. Enter the height and width of the video image used in your video project, and then click OK. If you’re working with a DV-format project, make the image 720 pixels wide and 534 pixels high if you are working with NTSC footage, or 768 pixels wide and 576 pixels high if you are working with PAL footage.
4. Draw an object. Any old object will do, so let your creative juices flow.
   
5. When you are done drawing, choose a color from the color palette that was not used in your drawing (or whatever object you actually drew in Step 4).
   
6. lick the Fill tool
7. Click a blank area of the image to fill it with the new color.
8. Save your picture and then close Paint.
9. Open Pinnacle Studio and the project in which you want to use the overlay graphic.
10. Click the Show Photos and Frame Grabs tab on the left side of the album.
11. If your drawing doesn’t appear in the album, click the folder button at the top of the album and browse to the folder in which you saved your Paint graphic. By default, Paint saves files in the My Pictures folder.
12. Drag the overlay graphic from the album and drop it on the title track of the timeline. The overlay image should now appear over the image in the video track, You’re probably wondering how Studio knows how to make the background of an overlay graphic transparent.

When you place a graphic in the title track, Studio looks at the color of the pixel in the upper-left corner of the image and removes that color from the entire image. For example, if the upper-left pixel is black, all black pixels become transparent, whereas pixels that are blue, red, yellow, or other colors will remain. You may need to experiment with some different background colors for the best results. I have found that black works best most of the time.

Placing images in the timeline of Pinnacle Studio

Studio is pretty conventional in the way it handles still graphics, which is a good thing. You can import pictures into the program and drop them in the timeline, just like almost every other video program available. Studio also makes it easy to use graphic images on top of video.
Studio’s media album has a special section just for still graphics. You can open it by clicking the Show Photos and Frame Grabs tab. By default, the album shows images in your My Pictures folder, but you can browse to a different folder if you wish by clicking the small folder icon.
To use a picture in your movie, simply drag it from the album and drop it on the video track of the timeline. The default duration for a still graphic is four seconds. To change the duration, select the clip in the timeline and click the Open Video Toolbox button. The video toolbox window appears above the timeline. Type a new time into the Duration field at the top of the toolbox window. Alternatively, you can just click-and-drag on the edge of the still clip in the timeline to adjust its duration.

Using images in your movie project

iMovie can use any picture that has been imported into iPhoto. In fact, importing the image into iPhoto first is mandatory — so if you haven’t imported your still graphics into iPhoto (as described in the previous section), do so now. When that’s done, you can start using still images in iMovie:

1. Open iMovie and the movie project in which you want to use a still image.
2. Click the Photos button. A collection of pictures that looks eerily similar to your iPhoto library will appear in the iMovie window.If you’ve gone to the trouble of organizing photos into different albums in iPhoto, you can switch between those albums using the menu above the image browser.
3. Click the clip that you want to use in the movie to select it.
4. Adjust the duration of the clip using the duration slider, which bears the images of a little tortoise and hare. The default duration for a still clip is five seconds, but if you want it to display for less time, move the slider towards the bunny, er, I mean hare. If you want the clip to appear slow and steady, move the slider towards the tortoise. At about this time, you’ll probably notice that your still graphic is moving in that little preview window in the upper-right corner of the screen. You’ll also notice the words “Ken Burns Effect” just above. No, the Ken Burns Effect doesn’t make Ken’s smiling mug appear in your movie. It makes the camera appear to slowly zoom in or out on the still image, providing a visual continuity of movement that is otherwise broken by using a still image amongst moving video clips. (Ken Burns, the well-known documentary filmmaker responsible for such films as The Civil War, uses this trademark effect in a lot of his films.)
5. Click the Start radio button near the top of the screen. This allows you to adjust the zoom level at the beginning of the clip.
6. Adjust the zoom slider. If you don’t want to zoom in on the image at all, drag the slider all the way to the left so that the zoom factor says 1.00.
7. Click the Finish radio button near the top of the screen. This allows you to adjust the zoom level at the end of the clip.
8. Adjust the zoom slider again. If you don’t want to use a “Ken Burns” zooming effect, make sure that the zoom factor at the Start and Finish of the clip are the same.
9. Click Preview to preview the results of the effect. If you aren’t happy with the effect, continue tweaking the zoom settings and previewing the results.
10. When you’re done making adjustments, drag the clip and drop it down on the timeline or storyboard to insert it in your movie.

You can still adjust clips after they have been dropped into the timeline or storyboard. Select the clip, click the Photos button, and then adjust the duration or other attributes in the Photos panel. Click Apply when you’re done making changes.

Organizing photos with iPhoto

In the interest of simplification, iMovie uses Apple iPhoto for organizing still photos. This makes a lot of sense if you think about it; these two programs work together pretty seamlessly. If you already use iPhoto to organize your still images, you can move on to the next section. But if you haven’t used iPhoto yet, you’ll need to before you can use stills in iMovie. I recommend that you have iPhoto version 2 (or later) installed on your computer. iPhoto comes preinstalled on any Mac that ships with OS X. If you don’t have the latest version, visit www.apple.com/iphoto/ to download this free program. Follow the instructions on the Apple Web site to download and install iPhoto. For more on using iPhoto, check out iPhoto 2 For Dummies by Curt Simmons, published by Wiley Publishing, Inc. When the program is installed, you can begin organizing your stills:

1. Launch iPhoto by clicking its icon on the OS X Dock. Alternatively, you can open it from the Applications folder on your hard disk.
2. Choose File➪Import. The Import Photos dialog box appears,
3. Browse to the folder that contains the picture or pictures that you want to import.
4. Select the picture and click Import. To select multiple pictures, hold down the Ô key while clicking each picture file you want to import.The picture appears in the iPhoto library. After the picture is imported into iPhoto, it’s ready for use in iMovie as well.
5. You can now quit iPhoto if you want by pressing Ô+Q.

Getting the colors just right

I described how TV screens and computer monitors don’t show colors exactly the same way. The biggest problem is that some colors in computer graphics simply cannot appear on a TV. These colors are often called illegal or out-of-gamut colors. Although this isn’t a super-serious problem, you should still fix any out of gamut colors in your images before using them in video programs.
Unfortunately, the ability to easily fix out of gamut colors is usually only found in more advanced, expensive video-editing programs. Adobe Photoshop, which retails for about $600, is one such program. To fix the colors in an image, simply open the picture in Photoshop and choose Filter➪ Video➪NTSC Colors. This filter removes all colors from the image that are out of gamut for NTSC TVs. A lower-cost option that also enables you to fix out-of-gamut colors is Photoshop Elements, which is available for a much more affordable price of about $100. You might even be able to get it for free with some digital cameras.
If your image-editing program doesn’t have a video color filter, I wouldn’t lose too much sleep over it. But if it does, fix those out-of-gamut colors so that the image looks better in the final video program.