Titles No video is complete without titles. DVMaker makes working with titles easy, and you can use all of your favorite fonts. Right now we'll add two lines of text to give you the idea. > Insert your copy of the DVExamples1 disk if it's not in the drive. > Drag your scene to the right by its Drag Bar so that it starts at 14.00 seconds. > Add a new scene that begins at 1.00 seconds. > In the Scene Script, drag down a new track. Click BackDrop. Click OK in the requester without changing any settings. Add a Show effect to your track at 0.05 seconds. The backdrop track gives you a blank screen to work with. You can do a lot of stuff with backdrops that we aren't going to show you here. We'll just use the blank backdrop. > Drag another new track down below the Backdrop track. Click Textline in the requester. The Text Line requester appears. The Text Line requester lets you create lines of text using any of your Amiga fonts. You can control the style, color, and shadow all from this one requester. > Click in the Text edit box and change the text to Shuttle. click on the diamond 20 font. Click Preview. When you click Preview, the lower part of your screen shows you a preview of what your text will look like. You can continue to change the text styles and other options, and the Preview screen will update to show your changes. > Change the color numbers for the text (left box) and shadow (right box) to 13 and 9, respectively, by clicking the arrows or by clicking in the appropriate box and entering new numbers. Click the Italics, Underline, and JAM2 buttons. > Click OK to return to the Scene Script. > Drag down a Position effect and place it at 1.00 seconds. Click OK in the What and Where requester without making any changes. Drag down a new effect and place it at 12.30 seconds. Click Hide in the requester. Now that you have one textline with its Show and Hide effects in place, it's easier to copy this track and modify it than to create one from scratch. > Select the Shuttle track and choose Copy from the Edit menu. Choose Paste from the Edit menu and paste the new track below your Shuttle track. Attach the new Shuttle track to the first Shuttle track. > Double-click on the new track to display the Text Line requester. Change the text to by [your name]. Click Underline and JAM2 boxes to thurn them off. Preview the results and click OK if you are satisfied. Now we want to position the new text line below the first text line. > Double-click on the Position effect on your "by name" track to display the What and Where requester. Click the Preview Where button. In the Preview screen, drag the "by name" line down below "Shuttle" to wherever you think looks good. Choose Close from the Preview menu. Click OK to accept the change. > Choose Play Video from the Project menu to see your video complete with titles. Out titles are pretty plain. Here are some idea for jazzing them up if you want: move the Position effect on the second line so that it appears later; replace the Position effect on the Shuttle text line with a Wipe effect; if you are really abmitious, hae the titles slide onto the screen with a MoveTo effect. Creating a Looping Video Often you'll want to create a looping video that you can start and leave playing. This is so easy to do that we can't help showing you how, even though you probably don't want to watch your shuttle launch endlessly. Here's how to make the video loop: > Double-click the Video track to open the Video requester. > In the Control area of the requester, click the Loop box. Click OK to accept the change. Now when you play your video, it loops back to the beginning after each play. To stop the video, press the Esc key or click the right mouse button to display the Control Panel and click the Power button on the far left. * You can put your video and the Parts that compose it on separate disks. However, if they're not on the same disk, you'll get an error message when you try to play your video, unless the disks that contain the video and its Parts are in your floppy drives. Brushing It Up Before we leave this tutorial, there are a couple of issues we'd like to address. Tune And Sound Play Priority You might have noticed that the zoom sound for your shuttle launch isn't playing when you play the video. This is because the Amiga can play ony four voices at one time. Your tune, Zarathustra, uses four voices, and the zoom sound is trying to use two more. To fix this little problem, you need to set the priority for the Sound tracks higher than that of the Tune track. This will get the sound to play over the tune. Here's how: > Double-click on each of the Play effects, and in the Play Sound requester, set the priority to 1. Tunes have a priority of 0, and that priority cannot be changed. By setting the sound priority to 1, you tell Deluxe Video that playing the sound is more important than playing the tune. Now when you play your video, you'll hear the zoom. Adding Color Cycling The flames brush in your video is actually a color-cycling brush. It will look better if you make it cycle. Here's how you do it: > Drag a new effect down to the Launchpad.Pic track. Choose ClrCycle in the requester. Adjust the start and end times to match the PlayAnim effect for the Flames.AnBr track. Adding a ClrCycle effect to the picture track causes the picture and everything attached to the picture to cycle colors if there is color cycling information in the part. In our case, only the flames brush has a cycle range, so it is the only part that cycles. Leaving A Smoke Trail Usually a rocket leaves a smoke trail. You can do this with your smoke brush also. To have your brush leave images of itself behind on the screen, you add a Stamp effect to that track. > Drag a new effect down to the Smoke.AnBr track and choose Stamp in the requester. Adjust the start and end times to match the PlayAnim effect for the smoke brush. Now when you play your animation, your smoke leaves trails. There are other ways to get an object to leave trails, but the advantage of the Stamp effect is that it affects only the brush track it is attached to. Other Suggestions There's a lot more you can do to improve this simple video. You could adjust the timing of the launch to the exact moment you want. You could add fancy wipe effects and the opening and end of the video. If you have DeluxePaint III, you can create a fancier smoke brush and use it instead of our smoke brush. Further on in the manual, you'll learn some more tricks you might want to try with this video, so save it again now for future Reference. Tuturial Two: The MovePath Effect * We prepared this tutorial for users who don't have a hard drive. If you're using a hard drive, you'll have to make some simple substitutions in our instructions to take your directory and drawer configuration into account. In the previous tutorial we showed you how to use the MoveTo effect to move your shuttle brush and other brushes up the screen. To move a brush in a straight line, MoveTo is usually the best effect to use. However, if you want to move a brush on the screen is a complex path, the MovePath effect provides an easy solution. In this tutorial, we'll use the MovePath effect to move an animated bird brush across the screen, and in the process we'll use many of the features of the Path requester. To Begin You'll need your working copies of the DVMaker disk and the DVExamples1 disk and an initialized data disk for saving your work. > Insert the DVMaker disk in DF0: and the DVExamples1 disk in DF1:. Start DVMaker and begin with a new Video Script. Setting Up > Open the Scene effect in your new video. > Drag down a new track and click Backdrop in the requester. Click OK in the requester without making any changes. > Drag a new effect down to the Backdrop track at a Start time of .05 seconds and click Show. > Drag a new track down to below the Backdrop track. Click AnimBrush in the requester. Previewing An AnimBrush > In the Part requester, open the AnimBrushes drawer on your DVExamples1 disk and find the file Bird.AnBr. Click on the file-name to add it to the In Video window. > Click Preview to see a preview of your animbrush. > When the Preview screen appears, you see the first frame of your animbrush. If you happen to have more than one version of your animbrush, so you can see all frames. > Hold down the number 2 key at the top of the keyboard. The number 2 key steps you forward through your animbrush. If you want to step backwards, hold down the 1 key. Notice that the numbers at the top of the preview screen show you how many frames there are in the animbrush and which frame you are viewing. This feature is important if you need to set your animbrush to start or stop playing on a frame that is not the first or last frame of the animbrush. (You set start and end frames in the PlayAnim requester.) > Choose Close from the Preview menu to return to the Parts requester. Click Select to select the Bird.AnBr as your animbrush. When the Parts requester closes, you are back at the Scene Script and the Bird.AnBr track is automatically attached to your BackDrop track. The Path Requester > Drag a new effect down to the Bird.AnBr track at 0.05 seconds and click MovePath in the requester. In a moment, the Path requester appears. Using the Points Area The Points area of the Path requester lists the points of your path, and contains gadget for inserting, changing, or deleting a point in the path. If you need to plot specific coordinates (in pixels) for the path of your brush, you would want to sue the Ponts area of the requester. Let's insert a point, change it, and delete it just to see how the gadgets work. > Click on the only point in the list (1:0,0). Now click the Insert button and watch what happens. The insert Button adds 10 to both the x and y coordinates of the selected point and then inserts the new point below it. You now have a second point (2:10,10). Notice that the X and Y boxes to the right of the points list contain the numbers 10,10. > Click on point 1 again. Now the X and Y boxes contain the numbers 0,0 again. When you click on a point, its coordinates are inserted in these boxes. If you want to change the coordinates of a point, you select it, change the numbers in the boxes, and click Change. Let's do it now. > If point 2 is not already selected, click on it. Click in the X box, delete the numbers there. Type 50 and press Return. Click in the Y box, delete the numbers there. Type 50 and press Return. Click Change. Your second point has the coordinates 50,50. In the step above we italicized the instruction to press Return, because the coordinates will change only if you have pressed the Return key in each of the boxes. Now, let's delete the second point to get to where we started and move on to other areas of the requester. > Point 2 should still be selected. Click Delete. Tracing a Path At the bottom of the Path requester are buttons to Trace and Edit a path. Right now we'll trace a path for our bird brush. > Click Trace. The Preview screen appears with your bird brush to the center. This preview screen works like the preview screen in the MoveTo requester. We want to start the brush off the screen, so we need to reduce the view. > Press the h key. Drag the bird brush to the offscreen area in the lower left corner. Just as in the MoveTo requester, you can drag your brush to any position on the screen. Unlike the MoveTo Requester, the Path requester remembers the path you dragged the brush over and traces it on the screen. Do you see the line drawn from the middle of the screen down to the lower left corner where you dragged the brush? Okay, you may not be able to see it well enough, so we'll use one of the Preview keyboard commands to change the palette. > Press the c key. Each time you drag the brush in the preview screen for Trace, the most recent path is remembered and traced. We want the bird to fly in an S pattern across the screen and upward. > Drag the Bird brush from the lower left corner to the upper right corner in an S path. > Once you have your S path, choose Close from the Preview menu. For now, we'll use the Options in their default settings, these are the settings you use most of the time. We'll come back and change some settings later. > Click OK to accept your new path settings and return to the Scene Script. > Choose Play Scene from the Project menu to see the bird trace your path. That was pretty boring, wasn't it? We had you play it that once so you could see the path clearly and to make the point that although the MovePath effect shows your brush (because Show at start was on in the Options area), it doesn't play your animbrush. You need a play effect for that. > Drag a Play Anim effect down to the Bird.AnBr track at .05 seconds. In the PlayAnim requester click Continuous, so that the bird will flap continuously through the move. Click OK. Adjust the duration of your Play Anim effect to match the MovePath duration. > Choose Play Scene from the Project menu. Editing The Path Your bird probably flew beautiful and you have no need to edit the path, but we want to show you how editing works anyway, so you can use it in the future. > Double-click on the MovePath effect to display the Path requester. > In the Path requester, click Edit. If you can't see the path very well, press the c key to change the palette. The Edit preview screen looks much the same as the Trace preview screen, except that now the path has small boxes attached to it. These are the points of the path. Editing Individual Points You can edit any point by positioning the brush on the point and then dragging it. Right now the bird brush is at point one, so that is the point you can edit. > Press the h key to reduce the view. Drag the bird brush down and to the right and watch how the path adjusts to the new position. To edit another point, you need to move the brush by using the + (plus) and - (minus) keys. > Hold down Shift and press the + key at the top of the keyboard. The brush will move up to point two. Drag the brush down to approximately where point one was before you moved it. If you have a long path and want to get to a specific point quickly, say the end, there's an easy way to do it: Close the Preview screen and click the point you want in the POints list of the Path requester, then click Edit to return to the Edit preview screen; your brush will be positioned on the point you selected. Try editing other points if you like. You'll see it's easy to create complex paths. Sizing and Moving The Path In addition to editing single points, you can use the Edit screen to change the size of your path or to move the path to a new position. The path has a rectangle around it with little handles to drag for editing. You use the handles to size the path. > Click in the middle of the path so that the handles are displayed. Point to the middle handle at the bottom and drag it upward until the path rectangle is about half as tall as it was before. You can move the path by dragging it from somewhere inside the rectangle. > Move your pointer to the middle of the path rectangle and drag downward until the path is centered in the screen. > Choose Close from the Preview menu to return to the Path requester. If you like, go ahead and click OK and play your scene again to see what the new path looks like. More About Preview There's more to know about using the preveiw screen with the Path requester and with other effects. You'll find more information in the Reference number Load in the description of the Parts menu. MovePath Options Before we move on to look at Relative paths, lets look at some of the other options in the Options area of the requester. You use the Options area of the Path requester to select how the brush follows the path. Repeat lets you set a specific number of times you want your brush to follow the path. The default setting is for one Repeat of the path. If you select Repeat, you can't change the druation of the MovePath effect. The Continuous option causes the brush to follow the path for the duration of the MovePath effect, and you can change the duration by dragging the End arrow of the effect. One warning though: if the duration is too short, the brush won't finish the path before the effect is over. You use the Time Step option for selecting the spacing of points as you drag your brush to trace the path. A higher number gives a wider space between points as you drag, and thus fewer points from beginning to end. This Time step number doesn't affect the time it takes for the brush to complete the path, it only affects the spacing of points when you create a brush. Show at start and Hide at end function the same as they do in the MoveTo requester. Essentially they save you the trouble of adding Show and Hide effects to your brush track. We'll let you look in the Reference for an explanation of the other options. Right now, we want to show you how to use the Relative option, because it is especially powerful. Creating Relative Paths In our previous example, the bird brush flew on an Absolute path. This means that the path was measured based on the origin of the track to which your brush was attached. If you were to set that path to repeat, it would repeat from the same point where it started the first time. Now we want to create a Relative path. This means that the path is measured based on the current position of the brush. If you set a Relative path to repeat, it repeats from the last point of the previous move instead of going back to the point where it started the first time. Let's do the example. > Go to the Scene Script. Select the Bird.AnBr track and choose Turn Off from the Edit menu. This makes your track inactive. We would have your erase it, but you might want to save all of this later for reference. > Drag down a new track and click Brush in the requester. When the Parts requester appears, go to the Brushes directory on your DVExamples1 disk and find the brush, SmallEraser.Brush. Click the file and click Select to use it. Your brush is automatically attached to the BackDrop track, which is what we want. A Repeating Absolute Path > Drag a new effect to start at .05 on the SmallEraser track and click MovePath in the requester. > When the Path requester appears, click Trace to trace a new path. Press the h key to reduce the screen and press the c key to change the palette so you can see the path better than you draw it. > Drag your SmallEraser brush down to the lower left corner of the backdrop. Then drag a path that runs diagonally across the screen and back. > Once you have the path traced, chose Close from the Preview menu. Your path moves across the screen and back only once, but you can make it cross the screen several times by changing the number in repeat. > Click the up arrow beside Repeat to change the number of repeats to 5. Click OK to use the current settings. Choose Play Scene from the Project menu. As we stated above, because your path is set as Absolute, your brush repeats each time from the first starting point, so the brush moves over the same area five times. We want the brush to move upward as though it is earsing the entire screen. We can do this by changing the path to be Relative. A Repeating Relative Path > Double-click on the MovePath effect to open the Path requester. In the requester click Relative, then click OK. This time when you play your scene the brush will continue upward at the end of each stroke. (We'll tell you right now that this isn't going to work exactly right, but we want you to play it this way anyway.) > Choose Play Scene from the Project menu. This time your brush continued upward as we expected, but it started in the middle of the screen! At first you might think this was incorrect, but if you think about it, you'll see that it is exactly right. The path started at the last position of the brush. Positioning Before a Relative Path Since the default postion for any object is the middle of the screen, your brush in the last example started its path in the middle of the screen. What you need to start it right is a Position effect. > Drag your MovePath effect box below the track time line. Drag a new effect down to the SmallEraser track at a start time of .05 seconds and click Position in the requester. > In the What and Where requesters, click Preview Where. > On the Previous screen, drag the brush down to the lower left corner of the screen where you want it to start its path. Choose Close from the Preview menu. > Click OK in the requester. > Choose Play Scene from the Project menu. This time you should see your brush start from the lower left corner where you positioned it. Tutorial Three: Using DVMover * We prepared this tutorial for users who don't have a hard drive. If you're using a hard drive, you'll have to make some simple substitutions in our instructions to take your directory and drawer configuration into account. To complete this exercise you'll need your copies of the DVideo and DVExamples1 disks, and a blank (but named), initialized data disk. DVMover is a utilty for copying and/or moving a video file with all of its (necessary) Parts data to another disk or drawer. DVMover also changes the Part drawer names in the video to match the new location of the Part files. Using DVMover breaks down into the following steps: 1. Boot DVMover. 2. Load a video into DVMover. 3. Change the destinationdrawer to the new location. 4. Copy the video. DVMover Window DVMover is one of the three utilities that came on your DVideo disk. We're going to use it to copy a complete video called Special Effects (on your DVExamples1 disk) to another disk. If you're using floppy drives: > Insert your copy of the DVideo into a floppy drive and double-click on the disk icon to open it. > Double-click on the DVMover Icon. If you've loaded all of Deluxe Video III on your hard drive, using our installation instructions (Chapter 1): > Open DVMover from teh DVideo drawer. When you boot the program the DVMover Window appears, partially obscured by the About DVMover message. The message gives copyright information about the utility and a brief reminder of what the utility does and how to do it. > Click OK to see the whole window. The Window is divided into two main sections, Destination and Parts in the Video. The Destination window displays the directories and disks that are currently loaded and the Parts in the video window lists the Parts that have been loaded in DVMover. When you first start DVMover, this area is empty. > If you copy of DVExamples1 is not already in your second floppy drive, insert it now. > Click on [DVExamples1:] in the Destination window. If you can't see DVExamples1 in the window, click on the ? icon. This displays the names of all inserted disks. When you find [DVExamples1:] in the Destination window, click on it. DVExamples1 is displayed in the Video Drawer box and its contents, indlucing SpecialEffects, now appear in the Destination window. To copy Special Effects, we first need to load it. There are two ways to do this: > Either click the Load Video button in the middle of the DVMover window or select Load Video from the Project menu. Whichever method you use, a Files requester appears. > Click [DVExamples1:]. Its name appears in the Drawer box and its contents appears in white printe in the File requester window. Click SpecialEffects. It's name appears in the File box. > Click the Load button. In a moment the Files requester disappears and all the Parts that make up Special Effects appear in the Parts in the video window and SpecialEffects appears in the title bar of the DVmover window. * If there were more Parts to the video than could be displayed at one time in the Parts list, you could click on the up or down arrows to the right or drag the scroll bar to reveal the rest of the Parts. You now need a disk on which to copy the loaded video and its Parts. > Eject the DVideo disk and insert a blank disk. click on the ? icon to display the names of all inserted disks and then click on the Blank disk's name in the Destination window so it appears in the Video Drawer box. This disk is the destination of your copy. You can add a Drawer name to your disk name if you wish. Just move the pointer to the Video Drawer box and click to place the cursor where you want to type. > Before you copy SpecialEffects, let's change its name to distinguish it from the original file (which we think you'll want to keep). Click the Rename button, or choose Rename from the Project menu. > The Rename box appears and SpecialEffects is displayed in the Video name box. To rename the video (though not the video Parts), move the pointer to the SinSpecial and click. Type my and click OK. > Click the Copy Video button (or choose Copy Video from the Project menu). The utility copies all video Parts to the destination, changes the Parts drawers to match the new destination and then saves the video under the new name mySpecialEffects. Your copy is complete when the Parts disappear from the Parts in the video list and are displayed in the Destination window. TIP: In this simple copy to a blank disk we didn't need to use the Options below the Destination window. However, if you plan to move or copy many of your videos (if only for disk housekeeping or archiving), you'll want to understand how these Options can make your work easier. See DVMover in Chapter 6: Reference. Similarly, because we copied the entire video, we didn't need to use the buttons below the Parts in the video window. Those buttons apply only to selected Parts that you want to copy or move. Finally, if you have a video that fills more than one floppy disk, you'll need to use a special procedure. We'll describe how to do that in Chapter Six: Reference, under DVMover. > To quit the utility and return to the Workbench, select Quit from the Project menu. Tutorial Four: Using InstantSlideShow InstantSlideShow is a utility that lets you create a slide show video from a series of pictures. You can play a video created in this way with DVPlayer or you can load it into DVMaker and modify (edit) it like any other video. * We prepared this tutorial for users who don't have a hard drive. If you're using a hard drive, you'll have to make some simple substitutions in our instructions to take account of your directory and drawer configurations. To complete this exercise you'll need your copies of the DVideo and DVexamples2 disks. Using InstantSlideShow breaks down into the following steps: 1. Boot InstantSlideShow. 2. Add slides by clicking on picture names in the Files list. 3. Arrange the slides in any order. 4. Click on the Make Video button. InstantSlideShow Window InstantSlideShow is one of the three utilities that came on your DVideo disk. We're going to use it to create a slideshow video from two unrelated pictures and an animation. If you're using floppy drives: > Insert your copy of the DVideo disk into a floppy drive and double-click on the disk icon to open it. > Double-click on the InstantSlideShow icon. If you've loaded all of DeluxeVideoIII on your hard drive, following our installation instructions (Chapter 1): > Open InstantSlideShow from the DeluxeVideo drawer. When you boot the program a full screen window appears, partially obscured by the About InstantSlideShow message. The message gives copyright information about the utility and a summary of how to use it. > Click OK to see the whole InstantSlideShow window. The window is divided into two main sections, Files and Slides. The Files window displays the directories and disks that are currently loaded and the Slides window lists the slides that have been loaded into InstantSlideShow. When you first start InstantSlideShow, this window is empty. > Insert you copy of the DeluxeVideo III DVExamples2 disk into your second floppy drive. > Click the ? icon below the files window to display the directories of all loaded disks. > Click on [DVExamples2:] in the Files window. DVExamples2: appears in the Video Drawer box and its contents are displayed in the Files window. > Click on [/Pictures] in the Files window to open that drawer. You'll notice that there are three pictures here, CityPan.Pic, HAMSahpes.Pic, and Mermaid.Pic. > To load pictures into a slideshow, simply click on them, one at a time. Click on HAMShapes.Pic first. Its name, disk, and drawer location immediately appear in the Slides window. Now click on Mermaid.pic. It appears below HAMShapes.Pic. This is important because the pictures you select for your slideshow video play in the order they appear on the Slides list. Now lets add an Anim to our slideshow. > Click [DVExamples2:] in the Files window to display the other directories on DVExamples2. When you see [/Anims] you can click the ! icon to stop the list from scrolling. > Click on [/Anims] to select that drawer, and then click on LogoFly.Anim to load that animation into the slides window. You've now loaded the three elements of our slideshow. They're not, however, in the order we want to display them. When you don't load your pictures in their display order, you can use the buttons below the Slides window to rearrange them easily. Let's say we want Logo.Fly to appear first in our slideshow, followed by Mermain, and finally HAMShapes. > Logo.Fly is still selected (highlighted) in the Slides window. Simply click the button labeled First to move it to the top of the list. Click on Logo.Fly to deselect it. > Click HAMShapes to select it, and then click Last to move it to the bottom of the list. Because there are only three files in Slides, you could get the same result by clicking Later, which moves the selected slide one slot down (later) in the presentation order. > You're ready to make a slideshow video and save it to disk. Click the Make Video button or choose Make Video from the Project menu. > When a standard Files requester appears, click on the disk's name in the Files window so it appears in the Drawer box. To give your slideshow a name, move the pointer to the left side of the File box and click to place the cursor. Type a name. > Click the Save button in the Files requester. When the message "Please insert volume DVExamples2 in any drive" appears, swap DVExamples2 with your data disk; and swap again when the program prompts you to do so. There is no need to click Retry. The requester disappears and as the program makes your video it displays messages in the Menu Bar: first, Creating video named [whatever you called your video]; then, Creating scene named [the name of your first scene, and similarly with subsequent scenes]; finally, Savind [nameof of your video]. The double-z cursor will turn back into a pointer and you'll hear the disk drive stop working when your slideshow video is complete. Let's play your creation in DVMaker. > Select Quit from the InstantSlideShow Project menu to quit the utility and return to the Workbench. > Boot DVMaker. Choose Open from the Project menu. * In this exercise we're playing the new slideshow video with DVMaker. But you could also play your video from DVPlayer. From the Workbench, open the DVideo disk and arrange the window so you can see DVPlayer. Now open the disk that contains the video you just made. Click on its icon to select it. Hold down the Shift key and double-click the DVPlayer icon to play your video. > Save to DVExamples2. > Find the name of your video slideshow in the Files requester; click the name so it appears in the File box, and click the Open button. > The Video Script of your slideshow video fills the screen; your three scenes appear just as you arranged them in InstantSlideShow. > Remove the DVMaker disk and insert the DVExamples2 disk. > Choose Play Video from the Project menu to watch your creation! TIP: In this simple slideshow we didn't use the Options below the Files window. You probably noticed that the Wait x seconds box was selected and that 5 appeared in the box. This default setting tells the program to "wait 5 seconds" between slides when displaying your show. You can use the arrows to increase or decrease the time, or click in the box and set a time (in seconds). See InstantSlideShow in Reference when you want more information about these Options. Chapter Four: Video Design & Creation DeluxeVideo III lets you put together data from other sources to create an audiovisual presentation. So far in this manual, you've seen how to use Deluxe Video III's many features to create videos, but the entire process of video creation has not been discussed. The purpose of this section is to explain techniques for designing and creating videos from start to finish. Used properly, the information in this section can save you many hours of work in putting together a complete video. The first section, Design, discusses the process of deciding what you want to put into a video. The Content Creation section shows how to use hardware and software to create the data to be used in a video. The Construction section details the process of actually putting together the video using Deluxe Video III. The Tips and Hints section gathers bits of useful techniques in one place. Finally, the Going to Videotape section offers some advice on putting your Deluxe Video III presentation onto videotape. Design Creating a video from start to finish can take a great deal of time, so it's important to plan the video creation process. In general, there are two main ways that videos are designed. In the first case, you have a set of data that you want to turn into a video; for instance, a series of pictures that you want to present in an interesting way, perhaps with musical accompaniment. In the second case, you have a clear purpose in mind and you need to create data form scratch; for instance, you want to make a business presentation, so you need to create images, animations, and sound effects to make your point effectively. Most times, your video requirements will fall somewhere between these two extremes - you may have some data to use already, but you have to create a great deal more to bring your video to life in an artistic way. This section discusses techniques for designing a video, and how to minimize the time involved to get exactly the result you want. By planning the video in advance, you'll save time and effort. When you begin to plan a video, follow the steps in this helpful checklist. 1. Determine the purpose of the video. 2. Determine the audience for the video. 3. Determine the contents of the video. 4. Draft a script for the video. 5. Create the data for the video. 6. Put the data into the video. 7. Edit the video to get exactly what you want. 8. Put the video on disk or on videotape. Let's examine each item in this checklist. 1. Determine the purpose of the video. This may seem obvious, but it's very important that you have a clear idea of what you want the video to do before you start. Is the video for entertainment, to help make a sale, to demonstrate a technique, to instruct a student, to make a title for a videotape? Perhaps the purpose is a combination of some of these or other elements. in any case, it's important to list the reasons for the video and (if there's moer than one), determine their order of importance. This serves as a guide throughout the video creation process. When you may be spending many hours or even days creating the data that goes into the video, you need to keep focussed on what the video is meant to do. 2. Determine the audience for the video. Once you have the purpose of the video in mind, you need to decide who your audience is. This affects your choice of the data used in the video, the presentation, the length of the video, and so on. 3. Determine the contents of the video. Now that you know the purpose and the audience for the video, you should decide what data you need to convey the information to the audience. Some of the data you need may already exist. Some or all of the data may need to be created. What types of data are necessary? Pictures, animations, music, sound effects? This is a step that you may need to come back to again and again while creating your video. The process of creating the video will give you more ideas about how to get your message across. So don't feel that the first list you make here is exhaustive, or that it should be. 4. Draft a script for the video. This script should not be overly complicated, because you'll find that it changes as the video is created. List the scenes and data necessary for the video, in the order that you think they should appear. Make some notes of the type of transitions you think you might use, and if you're moving objects on the screen, what type of motion you want. This document guides the process of creating the data for the video. Break the video into scenes for easier handling. Though usually everything could be put into one scene, it often makes it easier to break things up into scenes. 5. Create the data for the video. Now that your planning is far along, it's time to actually get the data ready for the video. some of the data may already exist; you may have the pictures or animations you need, or you might use a piece of music or a sound effect from another video or a data disk. At this point, make a list of all the data needed by the video, organized into types. List all the pictures, brushes, anims, music, and sound effects you will need. Mark any that aren't already created or that need to be modified. Then organize the list by the hardware or software you'll need to create the data. It's most efficient if you do all of your painting (for instance) in one session, or in one block of time. If you're digitizing pictures or sounds, setting up the equipment may take some time, and it's better to get all of your digitizing done in one session. If the video requires a great deal of data creation, it's a good idea to do a "rough cut" before you make the final data. Use pictures that you already have to represent the pictures you intend to construct, put in some text for the titles, use any music or anims that are handy. Get an idea of how the video will flow by using this substitute data. This lets you see how the video looks before you go to all the trouble of creating the data. You may decide to change the video based on this rough cut, and therefore the data you need for the video can change. Doing a rough cut can save you many hours of work. 6. Put the data into the video. Now that all of the data needed for the video is created, begin assembly of the video. Follow the script you created earlier, but be ready to make changes as you deal with the reality of video creation. You may find that it's easier to organize the information in a different way. Be flexible. Once you've got the video in its basic form, you may have to fine-tune it to get exactly the results you desire. Appendix B: Troubleshooting can help you get the video working properly. 7. Edit the video to get exactly what you want. Now that you see the video, you may want to change it. DeluxeVideo III makes it easy to experiment with different options, so you may want to try out some changes and see if the video benefits. Try different presentations of the material. Or you may want to go back and change some of the data you created, now that you can see how all the pieces interact. 8. Put the video on disk or on videotape. The video is finally done to your satisfaction, and now it's time to use it. For many purposes, it's enough to put it on a disk with DVPlayer (or it may take more than one disk). Use DVmover to move the video onto the disk where you'll use it, and then put a copy of DVPlayer on the disk. If you want to record the video on videotape, you'll need to hook up a VCR to your Amiga (see the Going to Videotape section for details). Planning Considerations When you're devising a script for your video, there's a number of important items to consider. While DeluxeVideo III is immensely powerful, it is still bounded by the limitations of the Amiga's hardware. Thus, you must consider these limitations before you begin, to avoid wasting a lot of your time. Memory Management Data files can take up RAM and disk space with amazing speed. A single HiRes picture (640x400) takes up 128K of RAM. Anim files can easily be hundreds of Kbytes in size. Digitized sound effects can chew up 20K a second. It's easy to create videos that are several megabytes of data and occupy many disks. The solution is to note the memory size of the various piece of data as you make out your script. Then you can total up the memory requirements and see if the video will fit onto the number of disks that you've planned on. If not, then trim down the size requirements by reducing the size of some of the data, or the number of colors in a picture, or perhaps just the number of parts used in the video. Disk Management DeluxeVideo III can create and easily cope with videos that are larger than the capacity of one floppy disk. If you need more than one disk to contain your video, you can use two or more disks, though when such a video is played there will be interruptions when you have to swap disks. For the smoothest video, try to keep all of the Parts for a given video on one disk. Preferably, all Parts should be in the same drawer to minimize search time and disk swapping. When you're running DVMaker, keep the disk with DVMaker on it nearby because the program does not put itself entirely into memory at one time. This means that while you can have two data disks in your floppy drives if you need that much room for data, you'll have to swap in the program disk from time to time. If you really want to make very large videos, a hard disk is indispensable. Of course, a video that's several megabytes in size on the hard disk would require multiple floppy disks for storage. Ram Disk Usage If you have more than one megabyte of RAM, you can speed up the performance of Deluxe Video III by using a RAM disk. A RAM disk is not ac actual disk, put a portion of the Amiga's memory that is set aside to simulate a disk drive. Anything in a RAM disk is already loaded in memory and is available without having to wait while it loads from a floppy disk. You can use a RAM disk in either one of two ways. By copying DVMaker to the RAM disk, you can speed up its operation by eliminating the time it takes to bring in portions of the program from disk. By moving a video to RAM (using DVMover) and playing it form RAM, you can eliminate disk-loading delays during playback. Copy DVMaker to RAM using the following procedure: > From the workbench, point to the DVMaker icon and, while holding down the left mouse button, drag it over to the RAM disk icon. > Release the mouse button and DVMaker is copied to the RAM disk. To play a video from RAM, use DVMover to move the video to the RAM disk. Then double-click the video to play it, and any delays caused by disk access are eliminated. CAUTION: If you ever lose power or accidentally turn off your computer, everything in your RAM disk will be lost. To avoid such disasters, make sure you save your video to disk often. Most importantly, make sure you save it to disk before you end your work session. Color Palettes While the Amia has 4096 colors available for use, in most resolution modes only a few colors are usable at one time (the exceptionis HAM resolution, which has other restrictions). This means that different pictures, brushes and anims will have palette conflicts unless you arrange otherwise ahead of time. If a brush is brought in with a different palette than the background picture, the brush palette is changed to match the pictures's palette, which usually makes the brush look terrible. It's important to plan out the various color palettes that will be used in the video, and which pieces of data need to have the same color palettes. Some of the color palette problem can be eased by using HAM mode, but then there can be a "fringe" color problem due to the way HAM mode works. Designing for Speed There are a number of techniques you can use to make the video faster, and particularly to get smoother brush animation. Try to keep the size of all parts used to a minimum; this can be done by reducing the physical size of a picture or brush, reducing the resolution, or by reducing the number of colors used. Use digitized music and sounds sparingly. Keep the number of different elements occurring at once to a minimum; the more things DeluxeVideo III is trying to do at one time, the slower things proceed. Expert mode is particularly valuable in DVMaker, because certain effects are available to make memory management and speed easier to achieve. Reduce disk loading delays by running from RAM or by using Load and Unload effects to keep the amount of memory in use at a minimum. Content Creation Planning how the video will be created is only half of the task. Once you know what you want, then you have to create it. This section discusses how to create various types of data for DeluxeVideo III. One of the advantages of the Amiga is the IFF standard for files, so that data can be exchanged bewteen all programs. This means that many programs that handle graphics and sound on the Amiga can produce data that DeluxeVideo III can put into a video. You can use any of these tools that you're familiar with to create the data you need for your video. Pictures Pictures and brushes are probably the most common elements of a video. Therefore, you can expect to spend a lot of time creating pictures. Deluxe Pain III can be used to create pictures and brushes in every Amiga resolution mode except for HAM; Deluxe PhotoLab can be used to create HAM mode pictures. Decide your palette strategy ahead of time if possible. It's best to organize your palettes carefully and then create the pictures and brushes you need. If you are working with existing artwork and need to convert or manipulate palettes (or sizes and resolution modes), then a tool like the Colors program from Deluxe PhotoLab is an enormous time-saver. This program allows you to convert pictures or brushes between resolution modes, reduce the number of colors in the palette, and other types of image processing. Work on a very large page in DeluxePaint III or Deluxe PhotoLab (if you have the memory) to put all of your artwork in the same document. This is helpful to make sure you have the palette selected properly, and to see how the artwork looks in relation to the other pieces. Digitizing As an alternative to painting, you can use a hardware evice called a digitizer or frame grabber. These devices plug into the Amiga and aceept input from a video camera or a VCR; with the software provided, they can take an image from the camera or VCR and convert it into an Amiga picture. This picture can then be modified or adjusted in a paint program and put into your video. Digitizing can save enormous amounts of time if you're trying to use a picture of real-life object in your video. However, you should be aware that a digitized image usually needs at least some touch-up in a paint program before you can use it your video, and sometimes a lot of work is needed. So plan on digitizing your images before you work with the paint program. Some video digitizers work in real time and are called frame grabbers; others only work on still pictures or objects (these are less expensive then frame grabbers). Music and Sound Adding music and sound to a video makes it a much richer experience. Fortunately, there are many program on the Amiga designed for creating music and sounds. If your video is not being sold or used for commerical purposes, you can use music taken from data disk published by Electronic Arts. Data disks like Hot and Cool Jazz or It's Only Rocl "N" Roll provide dozens of songs and instruments that you can easily put into your video. Programs like Deluxe Music or Instant Music let you create and edit music. Other programs, called sequencers, record music played on MIDI instruments. Such scores can be played back using Amiga sounds, or (by using a MIDI interface) on MIDI instruments for professional quality music. Try to minimize the number of instruments used in a song to reduce the memory required by Deluxe Video III. MIDI conserves memory space, since no Amiga instruments are used in playing back a MIDI tune. Hardware devices called audio digitizers can take any sound and convert it into a file that the Amiga can play back. There are several software packages that allow you to manipulate digitized sounds and turn them into Amiga "instruments", or use special audio tools for ususual effects. Animations Animations (or "anims") can be created by DeluxePaint III or other programs. Some programs combine 3D object creation and animation, and can create anim files. Anim files tend to be large, and can cause memory shortages. DeluxeVideo III can create anim files from a video, in order to get faster, smoother motion. Why create an anim when you can use DeluxeVideo III to animate a brush? Well, a Deluxe Paint III anim will play back more smoothly than a brush being moved by DeluxeVideio III (though the anim takes up far more memory space). And 3D packages allow you to define all sides of an object and creat an animation of moving around the object, something that's impossible with DeluxePaint III. The drawback of a 3D animation program is that it generally takes a very long time to create the animation, and the resulting files are often very large. Construction Now that you've got all the pieces of the video, it's time to put them together. Concentrate on getting all of the pieces in place first, then do whatever fine-tuning is necessary. Try to put together the hardest part of the video first, where you're most worried about memory or speed, to see if it works. If you're pushing the edge, use the Expert mode. Unload is a very useful effect for keeping the amount of memory used to a minimum. Try to shuffle parts out of memory the instant they're no longer being used with an Unload effect. Tips and Hints Use One Viewport Per Scene Unless you have a real need for more than one viewport track in a scene, don't use more than one. This will keep your scripts from becoming confusing and will help ensure that your Wipe effects always work properly. (See the Wipes & Pattern example in Chapter Five: Video Effeccts for more about viewports and wipes.) For Every Load There is an Unload Many effects do their own Load as part of the effect (for example, Show and Position effects also load the part if it is not already loaded). If you want your memory use to be efficient, you should unload parts that aren't needed at the earliest possible moment. Go through your video and check which parts are used in only one scene. If the part isn't used beyond the Scene, add an Unload effect at the end. Load When You're Not Doing Much Else Occasionally you'll find that your video slows down or stops to load data. Often you can solve this problem by either preloading the data when you start the video (though we recommend this only in the first scene of a video) or by adding a Load effect when not much is happening on the screen. If there are moments in your video when nothing is happening (perhaps just a picture is displayed on the screen), use this opportunity to load data. Creating Smooth Animation There are three things you need to keep in mind if you want smooth animation: ° Big things take longer to draw. If you're moving a large brush across the screen, the movement may be a bit jerky. When you design your videos, try to keep the brushes as small as possible and use as few colors as you can to reduce the number of bit planes being used. If you want very smooth animation in a complex video, you might want to use the MakeAnim effect to create an Anim file of the video. (See MakeAnim in Chapter Five: Video Effects for an example and explanation of the MakeAnim effect.) ° Integral speeds are smoother. When you use a MoveTo effect to move your brush, make sure that the jiffies/pixels or pixels/jiffies number divides to a whole number. It isn't possible to move a brush by a fraction of a pixel, so the brush will have to jump every once in a while to compensate if your pixels/jiffies reate is not a whole number. This is also true when you use the Scroll effect to scroll a picture. ° Slower speeds appear smoother. If you need to move a part across the screen, it will appear smoother if it moves fewer pixesl per frame (or jiffy). For example, if your brush is moving 320 pixels in 40 frames, it is moving 8 pixels per frame, and 8 pixels might seem like a pretty large jump. If it is possible to change the MoveTo so that the brush moves 320 pixels in 80 frames (or 4 pixels per frame) the movement will be much smoother. Going to Videotape The Amiga 1000 has color composite video output, which plugs directly into a VCR using a standard RCA video cable. Other Amiga models require either a composite adapter (available from Commodore or other manufacturers) or a genlock in order to put out color composite video. Record using line mode on the VCR. If you have audio, remember to connect the audio from the back of the Amiga to the VCR. If the VCR is mono, use a stero-to-mono adapter cable. If you're using MIDI output, then you must use the audio output from the MIDI equipment to the VCR. TIP: When recording the video on a VCR, be sure to set the Force Interlace option in the View requester. Chapter Five: Video Effects This chapter describes each of the example videos on the DVExamples disks. These examples demonstrate how you can combine the simple effects available in Deluxe Video to create impressive video effects. In our descriptions, we assume that you've read the other sections of the manual and are familiar with all of the basics and some of the more complicated aspects of using DVMaker. You don't need to read the examples in this chapter in any particular order, through occasionally we will refer back to a preceding example. In this case, just look at the example we mentioned so that you understand our reference. MoveTo & Path This video uses MoveTo effects to move the Running TV, Camera, and Dog animations across the screen. Then it flies the Bird animbrush across the screen using a MovePath effect. If you've worked through the Learning Deluxe Video chapter, you can probably figure out everything that is going on in this video. Here are a few things you should notice about the design: ° The video uses only one Viewport track per scene. This is always good advice. Use more than one viewport only if you have a very good reason. Notice that the WipeIn from the DV3-Logo scene to the AB-Stuff scene works beautifully. The first scene ended with the DV3Logo displayed. Because the DV3Logo viewport was still around at the end of the scene and it is the same size, display mode, and depth as the DV3Emboss picture, Deluxe Video uses this viewport to wipe in the DV3Emboss picture. (See the description of the Wipes&Pattern video later in this chapter for more information on this point.) ° To MoveTo effects for the animbrushes all have corresonding Play Anim effects of the same duration. ° The Slide and Wipe effects all have brief durations - one second or less. ° The scenes are named, so you can quickly distinguish their contents. (AB-Stuff for AnimBrush Stuff, because the scene moves three animbrushes.) What & Where This example is a series of MoveTo effects performed on a full size picture. Figure 5.1 shows very roughly the What and Where settings for each effect. (You might also want to take a look at the settings yourself.) We'll explain this example in some detail so that you can better understand what happens when you change the What or Where of a raster (picture, anim, or backdrop) or object (brush, animbrush, box). When you adjust the What of a raster or object, you are changing the rastport size. The rastport is like a window, through which you se the raster or object. The window can never be larger than the raster or object, but it can be smaller, as in the Position effect at the start of the video. (Note: when referring to viewport tracks such as picture tracks, we usually refer to the window as the viewport.) When you adjust the Where of a raster or object, you are indicating where in the View the rastport should be located. You can place the rastport anywhere in the View, or even outside the View if you want to move your object off screen. MoveTo effects have a duration. This means that the change from one set of What and Where settings to another set of What and Where settings occurs over time, and the change appears on the screen. The result is that changes in What show the window (rastport) shrinking or growing. Changes in Where show the picture or the window (rastport) moving or scrolling. Here's a summary of what you see in the video: Effect 1: This Position effect reduces the What to a small area in the center of the picture. The Where places the small rastport in the center of the screen, so the center of the picture stays in the center of the screen. An interesting note about this What setting: it results in an invalid viewport that the Amiga can't display. If your viewport is not half as wide as the screen, the left side of the viewport must be left of center, and the right side must be within the last third of the view. Otherwise, you viewport may not display. This is a hardware limitation that DeluxeVideo III tries to work around, but occasionally the hardware just can't take it. If you want to confirm that this viewport doesn't display, step through the video one frame at a time and watch the time between 1.00 second and 2.00 seconds - the screen is blank. Effect 2: This MoveTo effect sets the What to the full size of the picture and the Where is left at center screen again, so the change from Effect 1 to Effect 2 is a change only in the What. The result is that you see the picture zoom outward from center screen. Effect 3: This MoveTo effect sets the What to include the top half of the picture. The Where is set at the top half of the screen. The result is that the bottom half of the picture seems to close up. Effect 4: Here the What is the same size but is moved to the bottom half of the picture. The Where is also moved to the bottom half of the picture. The result is that the rastport (window) scrolls down ward. Notice that the change in What and Where together in the same direction scrolls the rastport instead of the picture. Effect 5: In this MoveTo, the What setting is unchanged from Effect 4. The Where is changed to the top half of the screen. The result is that the bottom half of the picture rises to the top of the screen. Effect 6: Here the What is set to full picture size and the Where is set to the center of the screen. the change from Effect 5 makes it look as though the picture is sliding down into the screen. Effect 7: The What is set to a small rectangel in the lower left corner of the picture. The Where places the rastport in the center of the screen. The result is that the screen seems to close down toward the corner of the picture and at the same time the corner shifts toward the center of the screen. Effect 8: Here the Where is kept constant in the center of the screen and the size of the What is kept constant, but the location of the What over the picture has changed. The result is that the picture seems to scroll within a small window in the center of the screen. Effect 9: Finally, the picture zooms back out to full size and is centered. This is the opposite of the transition between Effects 6 and 7. MakeAnim This video is set up to create an Anim file using the MakeAnim effect. Essentially, the video is a collection of single-letter Text LInes that move onto the screen with MovePath effects to spell Deluxe Video III. Before you do anything else, you should play the video to see it. The first thing you probably noticed about the video is that the letter flashed on the screen as they moved. This is not how you would normally want your video to look. We've set the Display Options for the scene to Restore Black (because we're moving the letters on a black backdrop) and we've turned off the Double Buffer option so that the letters move more quickly. We don't care if the letters flash as we play the video - they won't flash in the Anim. To see the Display Options for the Anim screne, select the scene and choose Change from the Scene menu. All you need to do to create an Anim of this video is to turn on the MakeAnim effect and choose Play. But don't do it yet! There are a few more things you should know, so keep reading. Setting the SavePath Double-click on the MakeAnim effect to display the Make Anim requester. You use this requester to specify a path and filename so that DVMaker knows where and under what name to save your Anim. You can also set a file size limit in this requester so that DVMaker doesn't create an anim that's too large to use. This requester already contains a name for your anim and a file size limit of 400K. If you specify no path, DVMaker saves your anim to the current path. Caution: If you use the name of a file that already exists on the disk, DVMaker will replace that file without a warning, since it is in the middle of the creation process. > Remove the DVMaker disk and insert your data disk. Enter the volume name of your data disk before the file name. For example, if your data disk is named Empty, you want the path to be Empty:DVIIIshort.anim. Click OK in the Make Anim requester. Leave your data disk in the drive when you choose Play Video Later. Sample Rate You can change the rate at which DVMaker samples frames for your anim by changing the Time Step in the Video requester. For example: the TimeStep for this video is currently set at 2 (or 2 jiffies per frame). If you increase the TimeStep to 6 jiffies per frame, fewer frames will be able to play in the time allotted, so DVMaker will skip frames to play the scene in the available time. If you try it botth ways, you'll see that a Time Step of 6 gives you about 1/3 the number of frames in your anim as you get with a Time Step of 2. Unfortunately, as you increase the Time Step, the animation becomes less smooth. Creating the Anim Okay, now you're ready to create your anim. > Select the MakeAnim effect. Choose Turn On from the Edit menu. Choose play Video from the Project menu. Your pointer will change to a number that displays the frame number your video is creating and saving as it creates the anim file. * When the video is finished, be sure you go back to turn off the MakeAnim effect. How To Abort A MakeAnim In Progress If you accidentally start to make an anim and change your mind, press the Esc key to stop the video. Most likely there will be a partial anim file on your disk already, but you can go out to workbench and throw it away. How To Play The Anim If you want to see your anim, you'll need to set up a scene, track, and effect for it. Here's what to do: Add a scene to your Video track after the Anim scene. In the Scene Script, add an Anim track and select your new anim file. Add a Play Anim effect to the Anim track - click Continuous in the Play Anim requester; click OK. Make the duration of your Play Anim effect last for the entire scene. Choose Play Scene from the Project menu. Wipes & Pattern This video demonstrates many different wipe effects that are possible in DeluxeVideo III. We've given the scenes in the video descriptive names to help you identify the scene with the effect you saw on the screen. You can learn a lot about the different wipe combinations just by watching the video and studying the scene scripts. In this section we want to mention a few important ins and outs of creating wipes. The first three scenes of the video have been set up as a demonstration of the points we want to make. Two Wipes In One Scene If you use two wipes in one scene to wipe one picture in over another, you're going to have little trouble. Open the first scene, 2 Wipes, and choose Play Scene from the Project menu. You see one picture wiped in from left to right, then the screen goes black for a moment and a second picture is wiped in with random horizontal lines. The problem with this set of wipes is that the screen goes black in the middle. The reason the screen goes black is that you have two viewport tracks and the second picture is being wiped into the second viewport, which starts out black. The best way to avoid this is to put the second track in a separate scene. Two Wipes In Two Scenes If your two pictures are the same size, display mode (LoRes, HiRes, Interlace), and depth (number of colors), you can use the same view port for both. You do this by putting your picture tracks in different scenes. When the first scene is over, unless you have released the viewport, the picture's viewport is still available. At the start of the second scene, DeluxeVideo looks for an unused viewport to wipe in your new picture, if there is a compatible viewport available, it is used. This exact situation is set up between the first and second scenes of our video. Play the video and notice how the third wipe effect wipes one picture over an existing picture. If you look at the script for the first scene, 2Wipes, of this video, you'll notice that we have a Release effect on the EALogo.Pic track. It is always a good idea to release unneeded viewports as you leave a scene. The viewports require memory, and also, if you want your next scene to wipe into a particular viewport, it is wise to make certain that that is the only viewport available. Otherwise you might wipe the picture into a viewport that isn't visible at the moment. Wiping In A Pattern The third scene of our video shows another way to wipe one picture in over another. You can use the Pattern effect to make a pattern of a picture track. If there is a Pattern available when a Wipe effect begins, the Wipe effect wipes in the Pattern. Open the third scene, Pattern, in our video. You'll see that there are two picture tracks, but that the second picture track is attached to the first and it has only one effect, Pattern. This tells DeluxeVideo that the second picture track is to be used as a pattern for the first picture track, rather than to have a viewport of its own. (If the second picture track were not attached to a viewport, the Pattern effect would cause an error when you played the scene.) If you play this scene, you see that the second picture track is wiped in over the first picture track. Note that the Wipe in effect still goes on the valid viewport track, because this is the viewport you are wiping into. Multimedia This video demonstarates the use of a Control track and GoTo effects on Brush tracks to control the branching of a video. Before you read the rest of this section, take a look at the video. Bring up the Control Panel to see what happens in the Counter area when you click the buttons: the button for Business presentations jumps forward to 5 seconds on the counter; Entertainment jumps forward to 10 seconds; Education jumps to 15 seconds; and Training jumpst to 20 seconds. Each of these button is a brush in the video, and clicking on one activates of GoTo effect that branches to a different point in the video. At the end of each branch, another GoTo effect on the Control track sends you back to the beginning of the video for another choice. Now that we've gotten through that synopsis, let's take a look at the acutal scene script. The Wait and GoTo Effects Scroll down to near the bottom of the Scene SCript so that you can see both the Tra-Button track and the Control track in the window. If you choose Screen>Interlace from the Options menu, you will be able to see more of the tracks and effects on the screen at one time. First let's look at the Tra-Button track. The Position and Show effects at the beginning of the Tra-Button track place the brush in the correct spot on the screen and make it visible. The next effect is a GoTo. This effect points to a label on the Control track so that clicking the button in the video sends you to a different point in the video. (If you double-click on the GoTo effect, you will see that it points to the Training label on the Control track. We'll look at that section of the video next.) But how does it know you want to go there? The Wait effect on the Control track tells the video to wait for you to give input. If you display the Start time for the Wait effect, you'll see that it is set at 0.16 seconds. If you display the Start times for the GoTo effects on the four tracks above the Control track, you'll see that these effects are also set at 0.16. The first thing the video does after it shows the picture and all of the brushes is to wait. It waits until you click on one of the buttons (brushes) with a GoTo effect at the same time as the Wiat (or before it). When you click the button, the video jumps to the label for the appropriate GoTo. In the case of the Tra-Button, it jumps to the Traingin label on the Control track. Let's look at what happens at that point in the video. GoTo And Label Effects Scroll over to 20 seconds into the video on the Control Track. This is where you'll find the Training Label effect. When you click the Training button, the video jumps to this label effect and plays for 0.18 seconds before it finds another GoTo. If you double-click on this GoTo effect, you'll see that it sends you back to the Start label at the beginning of the video. During the 0.18 seconds between the Training label and the GoTo, the video plays an AnimBrush track called Training.AnBr. This brush gives you the TV static and the training picture in the TV screen. The Stamp effect at 20.14 stamps the brush on the screen before control returns to the Start of the video again. SUMMARY (Boy, you know this stuff must be important if we include a summary.) Here's what you should have learned from this example: ° The combination of a Wait effect on the Control track and GoTo effects on Object (brush, AnimBrush, Box, Textline) tracks causes the video to wait until you click on one of the Objects. When you click on an object, its GoTo effect can branch you to another part of the video. ° If the end of your branch uses another GoTo to send you back to the beginning of the video, you can have multiple interactions with the same control structure (Wait/GoTo) and thus create a truly interactive video. JOYSTICK This example is similar to the MultiMedia example in that it shows how to use the Control track to create an interactive video. In this example, you use a joystick to control the interation instead of clicking on buttons. You'll need a joystick connected to the second port for this video to work properly. The Joystick effect lets you declare a label for each direction on the joystick and for its button. In this video, we've created a scene for each direction and the button. The Intro scene waits for you to move the joystick or press the button, when you do, it jumps control to the scene with the same name as the direction on the joystick. For example, if you push Forward, Control jumps to the scene labeled Forward. That scene in turn waits for you to give more joystick input. If you move the joystick again, it jumps you to the appropriate scene. If you don't move the joystick, it sends you back to the beginning. Our scenes simply display a line of text showing you which joystick input you gave, but you could just as easily jump to a picture of a cave with an animated dragon. SPECIAL EFFECTS This video is a good example of how to use the Options effect to change the way the sceen is drawn as a brush moves. It also shows how to use the Pickup effect to pick the image up off the screen. We'll explain this video scene by scene. THE RESTORE PATTERN DISPLAY OPTION In the Wipes&Pattern video, you saw how to use a picture as a Pattern behind another picture and then wipe it into the vieport of the first picture. The ShowPict scene in the Special Effects video places a pattern behind a blank BackDrop and drags a brush across the BackDrop while it is in Restore Pattern setting. This has the same effect as wiping in the pattern. The key effects in this first scene are the Pattern, Options and MoveTo effects. The Pattern effect on the Picture track makes the picture a pattern behind the BackDrop. The first Optins effect sets the display type to Restore Pattern. (You can confirm this by double-clicking on the Options effect.) The MoveTo effect moves the Eraser brush across the screen. As the brush moves across the screen, the pattern is restored behind it instead of the original BackDrop. Once the picture has been "restored" into the BackDrop viewport, a second Options effect is used to return the display option to Save and Restore. PICKING UP THE PIECES The Break scene uses a BackDrop viewport track also. Note the Continue effet at the very beginning of the BackDrop track. This effect causes the contents of the previous viewport to be carried over into this BackDrop viewport, so you see no change in the picture when the scene begins. The Options effect sets the display optin to Restore Black. In this setting, dragging a brush across the screen leaves black behind it. The Broken Bottom brush track is positioned in the bottom half of the screen. If you preview this brush, you will see that it has jagged edges at the top to simulate broken glass, but it is all white. It doens't need to be colored, because the track uses a Pickup effect to pickup the colors of the BackDrop track at the same time the brush is positioned. To simulate the effect of breaking glass, the first MoveTo effect moves the Broken Bottom brush just a little bit downward. When the brush moves, it leave behind black, so it looks like the screen broke. The sound effects reinforce the illusion. The second MOveTo effect drops the brush out of the screen while the Slide Out on the BackDrop track removes the top half of the picture. MORE ERASING The Pattern and Black scenes repeat the use of the Restore Pattern and Restore Black display options to erase the picture back into the screen and then erase it out again. VIEWPORTS This video demonstrates the manipulation of two viewports on the screen simultaneously. One viewport plays an Anim and the other displays a HAM picture. DeluxeVideo III makes it easy to display more than one viewport at a time. If you're making a standard video, you want to avoid having two viewports open at once - it just gets confusing. But if you want special effects that require multiple viewports and related matters in Appendix A: Some Technical Information. RELATIVE MOTION This video demonstrates relative motion. If you open the Mermaid scene, you'll see that an Bubbles animbrush is attached to a Fish brush which is attached to the Mermain picture. Just about everything in this picture is attached to something else. The advantage of relative motion is that it lets you move several parts in harmony by attaching them to a single part. For example, the Bubbles animbrush doesn't need a MoveTo effect of it's own because it is attached to the Fish brush and moves with it. You don't have to think about moving the Bubbles, they just follow where they belong. CREDITS This video contains two credits examples. Since the credits are created as Text Lines, you can change the text at any time and thus use this video as a template for credit sequences of your own. There are a couple things you should know about this example: ° The Text Lines are attached to one another, rather than all being attached to the BackDrop. In the Crawl scene, only the first TextLine is attached to the BackDrop, the others are each attached to the brush above it. This makes it possible to string many lines of text together and move them together with a single MoveTo effect on the first TextLine track. If you are working ona one megabyte machine, you will likely have to use this method to create a long string of credits. ° The disadvantages of attaching all of the text lines together and moving them with a MoveTo effect is that the scrolling will not be especially smooth. ° To create smoother scrolling credits, you should make your BackDrop large, attach the brushes to the large BackDrop and use a Scroll effect to scroll the backdrop. The ScrollingBG examples, below, shows how to scroll a large picture or BackDrop. SCROLLINGBG Scrolling backgrounds are a great way to create a long sequence out of something that would normally be very short. This video takes an oversize picture and scrolls it across the screen. At the same time, an animated car brush drives onto the scene and stays in the center as the background moves. The effect is that the car is moving. We'll just mention a couple of points about this example and then list some stuff you should know about creating a scrolling background. When you play this video, the car moves onto the screen before the screen begins to scroll. This is accomplished with a simple MoveTo effect that moves the CarBounce animbrush from off left to center screen. Notice that the end of the MoveTo effect, the beginning of the scroll effect on the CityPan track, and the beginning of the UnScroll effect on the CarBounce track all coincide. You need to have a UnScroll effect to hold the car in the center when the picture begins to scroll. Here are a couple of things you should know about scrolling: ° The picture must be bigger than its viewport or else you can't scroll it. In other words, if the What dimensions in the What and Where requester are the same size as the picture, you can't scroll it. If you want to prove this, you can opent the Scroll effect and set the picture to scroll on the Y axis. It won't scroll, because the viewport is exactly as high as the picture. ° If you want your picture to scroll smoothly, you should set the pixels and jiffies settings so that dividing one by the other results in a whole number. If your division gives fractions, you won't get a perfectly smooth scroll, because DeluxeVideo can't scroll in fractions of pixels or jiffies, so it jumps every once in a while to keep the pace at what you asked for. In our example, the picture scrolls 10 pixels for every 2 jiffies. This divides to the whole number 5, so the picture scrolls smoothly. TUNE This is another interactive video that asks you to choose whether you want your audio output played on the Amiga or through MIDI equipment (assuming you have some hooked up). Only the first scene of this video is remarkable. It uses Button effects on the Control track to turn on MIDI, and uses GoTo effects on TextLine tracks with a Wait on the Control track to allow mouse interaction. Take a look at the MultiMedia example if you haven't already. It is a more complex example and we describe it in more detail.