By William LaMartin, Editor, Tampa PC Users Group
lamartin@tampabay.rr.com

Creating a “movie” is a three step process: Capturing, Editing and Generating the Movie. I will only describe using an analog source, since I do not have a digital source or the digital capture hardware.

To capture, you select the Dazzle DVC as the source, select the capture quality, frame aspect ratio (4:3 or wide screen) and the name of the file to which the capture is saved. You may also indicate how frequently a thumbnail of the current scene is created and added to the ever growing filmstrip of such thumbnails. If you choose automatic scene detection, the software will create a new thumbnail whenever it detects a change in scene. In my first project, described below, I found that the automatic scene detection produced very few such thumbnails, so I switched to having thumbnails created at intervals of every five seconds. If I had desired I could have set it to create a new scene thumbnail whenever I clicked the mouse. Once all settings are made, you start the source running and click the capture button of the software.

One other setting that I did not mention allows you to view a preview screen of the actual video as it is being captured. The recommendation is not to do this, since it may interfere with the capture, so that was my choice. And having a thumbnail created every five seconds lets you know very well what is happening.

When you have captured your video material, it is then time to edit it. This is where all those thumbnails come in. In editing mode, you have the thumbnails laid out in the video scenes section of the Album window in the top half of the screen and in the story board below that in the bottom part of the screen called the Movie Window. To include any scene in the final movie, you simply drag a copy of the scene from the top window to the bottom story board. If all you want is to make a movie of everything you captured with no modifications, you would simply drag all the scenes to the bottom and then go the final step of generating the movie.

Once I had the collection of scenes that I wanted, I moved on to the generation of the movie and chose to create a file that could be streamed from the Internet and viewed with Windows Media Player. The program then works away for some time and produces the file in wmv format. Other output formats are rm, Real Video for the web and avi and mpeg for playing on computers. You may also save it to a CD as DVC, or to a DVD in the DVD format.

In the above, I added nothing to the video. I simply captured it and then used the software to turn it into Windows Media files that could be viewed on the Internet. They were also sized so as not to take up excessive bandwidth, with a screen size of 320 x 240. If I had been capturing and editing a home video or collection of such videos, I would probably have wanted to add background sound clips, transitions between scenes and titles. All of this is possible with the software and the included transitions. For sounds, some effects are included, or you may use your own sound files. You may also include still images. In addition to the included transitions, you may purchase additional ones. For my next project, I will see if I can use all these features.