Generating a Movie

Goals:

• Set up a Movie (Quicktime or AVI) to be rendered
• Add an informative Text Screen to the video
• Connect to a Server and render the Movie

Using the Generate Movie Utility

Under the "Generate Movie" tab, you will be presented with the following interface:

First are the server options. This is where you set up where the server is located on the network. The Remote Host field is the hostname or IP address of the server, and port is the TCP port that the server is listening on remotely.

Next are the movie options. This includes the output's file type, either QuickTime^? or raw AVI. The QuickTime^? option uses JPEG compression, so while the movie files won't look as good as raw AVI, they will be smaller. You can adjust the quality of a QuickTime^? movie by setting the quality percentage used by the JPEG compressor. Selecting 100% will produce the best quality but the largest file size. Next is the framerate, which should be set to the number of frames per second used to generate the images.

After the movie options are the file options. This is the input directory that contains all of the images saved from rendering the images, and the output file, which is the location and filename of the movie to be created.

Finally, we have the text screen options. A text screen is an image placed at the start of the movie. It is overlaid on top of the intial frame, and can be used to display text information about the movie. A movie can have any number of text screens, each having any number of lines of text. For every text screen, the lines are evenly spaced vertically, so for a text screen with only one line, that line is placed halfway down the screen. Press the "New Text Screen" button to add a text screen, and you'll be presented with the following:

Screens will be shown in the order they are listed in the drop down list. Currently there is no mechanism for changing that order, so take care to add the screens in the order they are to be shown. You can select different screens via the drop down box, with the current screen always shown.

Every screen has options associated with it. The defaults are fine for most people, but let's run through them anyway. Pressing the "Screen Options" button will show the following window:

At the top of the window are the font options. Select the desired font from the list. You can also change the font size and the font justification.

Next are the color options. Every text screen has associated with it a font color and a background color. Press the choose color buttons next to each to select the desired color. Also, the background's opacity can be set. This allows for a balance between seeing the initial frame of the movie, and maintaining legible text.

Finally, there are the miscellaneous options associated with each text screen. Here you can set the duration of the text screen, as well as choose to display the date on the screen. If the "Show Date" option is checked, the date will be shown in the form "Month Day, Year" in the selected location.

Press OK to commit the changes to the current screen. Pressing Cancel will cause any changes to be forgotten.

There's also a "Preview Text Screen" button. This will do a quick render of what the text screen will look like in the movie. This way, if there are any errors (such as font size), they can be adjusted before being sent to the server to be rendered.

Now onto adding some text. Type a few words into the text field labeled "Text:" and press the "Add New Line" button. This will cause the current screen to have that text added as a line. You can see what lines are available to you in the drop down list. Pressing the "Delete Line" will delete the currently selected line from the current screen.

Rendering the Movie

Once everything is ready, press the "Generate Movie" button to begin sending the data to the server. A window like the following will be shown:

This means the server recieved the first image and is now building the text screens for the movie. If no text screens exist, this will not occur. Once that is finished, the dialog will change to reflect the progress of the number of images sent:

Once all of the images are uploaded, the server will finish the movie and begin sending it back to the user. At that point the dialogue will change to the following:

Once the movie is finished downloading, the dialogue will change to the following:

The movie is now finished and can be found in the specified output location.

-- AndrewRader^?