Guide for movie creation

[Advance1 525]

We prepared this guide for the beginner, who want to create a movies about his favorite game, but they don't know what to start with.

 

First of all you will need a screen capture software. Second of all you will need to download and instal the K-Lite Codec Pack [download] and one of the program of video editing. We are suggesting to start with Sony Vegas [download], as this program is on of the simplest to editing and adding the effects one the video.

 

Now we will explain and show how to create a high quality movie with Sony Vegas by using already recorded videos. Usually there are no issues with the installation of this program, so lets move forward!

 

[spoiler=Sony Vegas 13.0 - Guide for beginners.]

So, you have run Sony Vegas. If you have version 13.0 (as I do), you will see this window:

In top right corner you can find the "video preview" window, which will show you the final result of your movie. It have some parameters of preview quality. It is set on "Preview" by default. There are no needs to change it, however if your PC are not that fast you can decrease your quality to "Draft". The quality on preview window will be worse, but it is nothing to do with the quality of your final movie. There are also the 2nd parameter of each quality (Draft, Preview, Good, Best) - Auto, Full, Half and Quater. They will change the resolution of video in preview window. You can decrease it or increase to enjoy better preview or less freezes, however it will not affect on final movie.

 

 

Now press File -> Properties (or just press Alt+Enter).

We will see the window of project properties. Here you can set the resolution, frame rate etc. But the main settings that you need to set:

Field order: None (progressive scan)

Full-resolution rendering quality: Best

Deinterlace: Interpolate fields

 

Now let's take a look on the timeline, which you can find in the bottom part of the screen. There will be placed the video and audio files, which will be your video by the end. You can scale the timeline by your mouse wheel. It can be useful if you need to set some part of your video to especial moment of the song, but you can't get in the same spot. Just scroll your mouse wheel up and the layers (Track) on the timeline will be scaled, which will help you to hit exact same spot.

 

Okay, now it's time to get directly to the point! To import the video and audio files press File -> Import -> Media and pick the content that you would like to use in your movie.

If the files format is fit to the program - you will see that the files that you pick will appears in project files. We also want to mention that there another way to add the files. You can simply drag the files to the timeline.

 

If you pick the 1st way of adding files, you will need to drag them from the project files to the timeline. You will see following image:

As you can see on the timeline appears 2 layers (Tracks). The 1st one (Blue) contains video, the 2nd one (red) - audio. To run the video you can press the "play" button on preview window or just press space. If you would like to play some part instead of full video, you will need to select certain part with holding left mouse button. You will see selected area as on the screen below:

 

Now let's add some more video files and audiotrack. Drag them to timeline wherever we like. This is how it looks like:

As you can see we have 5 layers. 1st and 3rd - videotracks. 2nd and 5th - aoudiotracks. If you don't need any sounds except the music - you can remove other audio. Click with right mouse button on the layer (Track) and press "Delete track"

 

Okay, let's pretend that we remove all unnecessary audio and place all video all over the timelike in the exact place that we want. So how create a 1 video file that can be played on the PC or uploaded on the internet? We will need to render our project. Select the region that we would like to render and press File -> Render As.

 

The window that will appear will have the settings for rendering. You will have a lot of pre-settings, but we will discuss only Video For Windows (.avi). This one we usually use to render our video. The quality is pretty nice and it looks good on the youtube.

Pick pre-settings that called 1080-60i YUV and press "Customize Template", because we will change this pre-set for our project.

In next window we will need to set the Frame size. We have 1920x1080 as it was setted in this pre-set. Now we need to set Frame rate. You need to set the same as your video have. We have 30 fps. In case if you have used 30 fps videos in your project, but then render in 60 fps - the movie will be 60 fps indeed, however it will just increase the size of the movie but the picture wouldn't be smoother. That's why you need to set Frame rate the same as your videos are or lower.

Now pick "Xvid MPEG-4 Codec" next to Video format and press Configure.

The only one parameter we interested with in this window - Target quantizer. You can change it between 2-8. The lower quality is - the better quality movie will have. The difference between 1-2 almost unseen, but the size of the movie will be increased. Thant's why I suggest to use 2-4. Press OK.

We are finished with Video, let get to Audio:

Let's pick the "MPEG Layer-3" next to Audio Format and the Attributes need to be the same as original audiofile. We have 256 kBit/s и 44.100 Hz.

That's it! We can save this pre-set to use it in our following projects. You will need to enter your pre-set name in the field where "HD 1080-60i YUV" is mentioned. Then press on the same icon and press OK.

 

 

This is pretty much it. Now press Render and wait until your movie going to be ready.