EDIT
YOURVIDEO
44 MA XIMUMPC NOVEMBER 2005
STAGE 1: PUT YOUR^
CAMERA TO WORK
We gathered the footage for this tutorial at a
wedding party; but you can use whatever foot-
age you have around. We shot with two cam-
eras, which gives us tons of footage to choose
from when we start cutting. We mounted our
digital camcorder on a tripod aimed at the rela-
tively bright stage, turned it on and left it alone
to capture the band and the full audio track.
We used Sony’s analog Hi8 TRV615 camcorder
to move around the darker dance floor, captur-
ing select scenes from the party.STAGE 2: TRANSFER THE^
FOOTAGE TO YOUR PC
Getting digital camcorder footage into Movie
Maker 2 is simple. Connect your DV camera
to your PC via FireWire or USB (whichever
your camera supports), turn on the camcord-
er, and switch it to the VCR or VTR mode.
When MM2 recognizes the camcorder, it will
walk you through a wizard that helps you
transfer the footage to your hard drive. MM2
has an option to automatically split the file
into clips as it imports your footage, but we
want more control over the cuts, so we’re
going to import the footage from each cam-
era as a single clip and manually split it later.
Getting analog camcorder footage is a
bit more complicated. You can use an ana-
log capture device like Plextor’s ConvertX
PX-M402U ($160, http://www.plextor.com), or you
can dub the analog footage onto a digital
camcorder tape by connecting the two cam-
corders using RCA and S-video cables. Note
that DV-AVI files are humongous—an hour
of video takes up about 13GB of hard drive
space—so make sure you’ve got the room
before you initiate the transfer.
Now that our footage has been added to
the asset collection, we’re going to check it
for quality. MM2 is an entry-level video edit-
ing application, and though it’s sufficient for
casual editing, it lacks some features found
in high-end video editing applications, such
as providing automatic feedback about
frames that are dropped during the capture
process. Dropped frames are typically indica-
tive of computer issues, such as a fragment-
ed or slow hard drive, or a PC in dire need of
a tune-up. We’ll use MM2’s Preview Monitor
to view the imported file and check for miss-
ing frames or audio glitches.STAGE 3: RIP THE AUDIO TRACK
FROM THE VIDEO FILE
Now we need to extract the audio track
from our DV camera. Audio plays a majorrole in the editing process. You’ll be
trimming video clips, discarding some,
moving or overlapping others, and bring-
ing in new ones, and everything must be
kept in sync with the audio. The easiest
method for our purposes is to simply put
a second copy of our band footage on the
Audio/Music track—MM2 will treat it as if
it were audio-only.
We wanted to make the band footage
a simple WMA file for a less cluttered but
easier to manage timeline. To do this, we
opened a new MM2 project, dropped our
video in the Audio/Music portion of the
timeline, and then selected File > Save
as Movie. MM2 recognizes that the proj-Select a quality setting for your imported
footage. We want a versatile AVI file, so
we’re opting for the DV-AVI setting.To capture only a portion of your footage,
select “Capture parts of the tape manually.”If you want to skip portions of your recorded footage, you can use MM2’s Preview Moni-
tor to control the DV camera from your PC.To extract the audio track from a movie,
drag that movie to the Audio/Music track in
Movie Maker, then use the export function
to save the audio in WMA format at the bit
rate of your choice.