Creating Movies

Movie Files | Creating Movies

Creating Movies

If your computer has a video camera, you can use it to create your own movie files. The documentation on software used with the camera should provide the details on how to create such movies and information about the formats. If the movies are stored in a proprietary format, it will also be necessary to locate software that allows conversion to MPEG or QuickTime format (recall that Sparkle will allow conversion between these two formats once the movie is in one or the other) or to AVI format (recall that trmoov converts between QuickTime and AVI). The camera software may already include such utilities, or instructions on how to obtain it.
There are also various programs that will allow you to construct movies from individual image files, somewhat like a conventional movie reel is created by putting together frames of still pictures.
As an example of a movie constructed from still frames, here is a truly spectacular movie (warning: 780 KByte MPEG) created by NASA using still images taken with the Hubble Space Telescope. This movie is as close to the viewscreen from the bridge of the Enterprise as we are likely to get in real life! (Here is an explanation of what you are seeing in this movie, in case you are interested.)
Finally, we note that not only can the Windows screen capture program SnagIt save snapshots of static screen areas (as we've seen), it can also capture a changing portion of the screen to an AVI movie.


			Movie Files \| Creating Movies
		Creating Movies If your computer has a video camera, you can use it to create your own movie files. The documentation on software used with the camera should provide the details on how to create such movies and information about the formats. If the movies are stored in a proprietary format, it will also be necessary to locate software that allows conversion to MPEG or QuickTime format (recall that `Sparkle` will allow conversion between these two formats once the movie is in one or the other) or to AVI format (recall that `trmoov` converts between QuickTime and AVI). The camera software may already include such utilities, or instructions on how to obtain it. There are also various programs that will allow you to construct movies from individual image files, somewhat like a conventional movie reel is created by putting together frames of still pictures. As an example of a movie constructed from still frames, here is a truly spectacular movie (warning: 780 KByte MPEG) created by NASA using still images taken with the Hubble Space Telescope. This movie is as close to the viewscreen from the bridge of the Enterprise as we are likely to get in real life! (Here is an explanation of what you are seeing in this movie, in case you are interested.) Finally, we note that not only can the Windows screen capture program `SnagIt` save snapshots of static screen areas (as we've seen), it can also capture a changing portion of the screen to an AVI movie.