Basic Movie Editing

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So, you've done free sites, you've done AVS sites, you've done thumbnail galleries and now you want to try movies. You've gotten yourself an account at a free movie host (such as http://www.need4xxx.net), you've purchased movie content (from somewhere such as http://www.sobegirl.com) and now you're ready to rock n roll!

But wait.. Those movies are huge. You can't submit them like that. You need to get them into 5 or 10 second chunks, and you certainly don't need that sound track, so what do you do? If you're like me, you spend several days downloading various trial copies of movie editing software, and finding that they are not fully functional. Or that they add more bells and whistles than you would possibly ever need.

Enter VirtualDub. A small program that you can use to chop up your new MPEG movies into useable clips for movie posts!

This basic tutorial will cover how to do just that. We'll take one large MPEG movie with a sound track, remove the sound track, and save clips in AVI format. We'll use a compression CODEC that should be available on 99.9% of the computers that your visitors will be using. Coupled with the AVI format, we should have very good results. So lets do it!

Open your MPEG movie in VirtualDub, (you can download a sample clip from Sobegirl if you don't have one). You should see along the bottom that there are buttons similar to the controls on your VCR. Get some popcorn, some hot butter and press play. Enjoy your movie. All done? Was it good? Good. Now lets get your lazy ass to work ;)

If the sound track is nothing but some wacky 70's porn music, then we probably don't need it in our clips. If it's moaning or something that might be useful for your sales, you may decide to leave it in. But for now, lets get rid of it. Click the Audio menu, and select No Audio.

Next, we need to tell VirtualDub what compression method to use. Click the Video menu, and select Compression. The compression menu should appear. Scroll down the list until you find MPEG-4, as in the screenshot here.

Note that you probably have a different selection of CODEC's than I do. You should however have MPEG-4 listed.

Next, click the Configure button. The configure menu should appear. Slide the Compression Control slider all the way to the right, towards Crispness. Position the Data Rate slider somewhere near 200, as in the screenshot below.

Click Ok, then Ok again and you're back at the main window. That takes care of setting up your compression method.

Now you need to tell VirtualDub how much of the movie you want to convert, so click Video again, and choose Select Range. Enter 7000 in the field next to Length in the Time (ms) column, as in the screenshot below.

You can enter how many frames instead, but since we want a 7 second clip in this example, we entered 7000. You do the math ;) Click OK and you're back at the main window.

Believe it or not, we're now ready to save our clip! So click File and select Save AVI. Give your clip a name, choose your destination directory and click Save. Your output file should be somewhere around 200k in filesize if you used a Sobegirl sample movie.

The next step is important and you should never skip it. Go and open up your clip in Windows Media Player. Make sure it runs, and that it's of a decent quality. In some rare cases, VirtualDub will make an AVI file that won't play. However, the solution is simple, if somewhat annoying. If your clip doesn't play, go back to the Select Frames step and change the start or end frame by 1 or 2 frames. Save your file again and try it. In every case where I've had of a movie not playing correctly, this solution has worked.

Hollywood better watch out, you're now a lean mean movie makin' machine! Good luck and good selling!

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