Join, Split, Trim

The project module enables you to produce new movies from multiple clips. Within the project module you can join clips or portions of clips, split or trim a movie, add transitions between clips or add text.

	The first step in producing your new movie is to add one or more clips to the movie list.
Clicking the Add button will open a browse window that permits you to navigate to any location on your system or network..

When you have added all the clips you may optionally trim any or all selections and add transitions.

The movie list contains multiple columns that reflect various properties of each movie. You can scroll across the columns with the horizontal scroll bar.

Selecting a movie in the list displays the movie's properties and loads it into the trimmer.

To trim any selection you must enable the trimmer. When enabled the start and end frames of each selected movie will be previewed. Scanning the file to index and extract the frames can take a considerable amount of time so it is more expedient to disable the trimmer when it is not in use. Previews for DirectX supported movies such as Windows Media, early Apple QuickTime and MPEG-4 movies may be very slow on some systems. To avoid this issue it is recommended that files to be trimmed should first be converted to MPEG in the file Conversion module prior to loading them into the Project module.

When the trimmer is enabled and the start and/or end frames have been changed, only the included frames will be joined to your output movie. Set the start and end frame with the slider for big moves and use the up-down buttons for single frames. Hint: You can view an actual size image of the frame by double clicking on the preview.

	When the Apply button is clicked the start and end frames are posted to the project movie list. The encoder will then use only the included frames.
If you select a different movie in the Movie List before Applying any changes you've made to the start and end frames the changes will be abandoned.

See the trimming walkthrough and video

Splitting a Movie

You can split a movie into smaller clips by loading only the movie that you wish to split into the Movie List; setting the start and end positions and saving as a new file.

Be sure to name each clip that you split from the source using a different name.

Adding Transitions

From the Project module you can call the transition wizard by right clicking on the file in the movie list...

...or by clicking the transition button.

The text that you enter into this window will be written to your output movie at the location you specify using the font, color and shadow that you choose.

In order to embed your text in your new movie, the Embedded Text Window must remain open during encoding. To dismiss the Embedded Text window, remove the check from the main window.

Movies can be saved as AVI (including MPEG-4), standard MPEG-1, MPEG-1 VCD, MPEG-2 SVCD or MPEG-2 DVD. *

When saving as AVI a list of all codecs installed on your system will be displayed. The quality and size of your output movie is determined by the codec.

When saving as MPEG you may optionally use the default setting for the format type or you may use custom settings.

Be aware that using custom setting for VCD, SVCD or DVD may create output files that are not supported by stand alone DVD players.

The button captioned "Set Width and Height to Match the Selected Source" will match the height and width of the file that is selected in the project module's movie list. To use the default settings of another movie in the list, select that movie before clicking the Encode button. All other movies in the lists will be resized to match the target file's height and width.

* The MPEG-2 patent owners require a royalty payment for every MPEG-2 enabled application, therefore MPEG-2 encoding is not available in the trial versions.