Let’s Make a Book Trailer — Part 11

Hello everyone, and welcome back to my series on making a book trailer.

Previous parts are here:  Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9 and Part 10.

As with the previous posts, the following are merely my thoughts on the trailer construction process.  Feel free to use or snort with derision.

In today’s post we cover how to import your PowerPoint trailer slides or movie into a video editor as well as some basic editing options.   We’ll focus on Microsoft Movie Maker.  It’s easily available to most Windows users (sorry Mac people!).

We’ll have to modify our constraints slightly so they read as follows:

• We’re creating a “Teaser” trailer
• Using PowerPoint to create most of the content
  
• No video, music, animation or voice overs
• Working with stock images or some commissioned images

Windows Movie Maker

Windows Movie Maker is a free, entry level video editing application available with Windows Essentials 2012. You can download a copy here.  It’s quite easy to use and comes with a variety animations, text editing capabilities, transitions, and sharing options.  It’s not as powerful as some of its paid competition of course, but if you’ve never done any video editing, it’s not a bad place to start.  Check out PC Magazine’s review for a much more thorough overview of the application.

Movie Maker Interface

The Movie Maker interface is quite straight forward and its menus and toolbar bears a slight resemblance to that of PowerPoint.  Menu options are as follows:

• File — provides what you expect, New, Save, Save As, etc.
• Home — displays the home ribbon with familiar cut, copy, paste options, add videos and photos to your project, record narration, add titles, apply a pre-set theme to your video, share options (e.g. Facebook, YouTube, etc)
• Animations — allows you to apply transitions (much like PowerPoint slide transitions) and set their duration, and apply pan and zoom effects
• Visual effects — allows you to apply various filters to your video and adjust brightness
• Project — various project wide settings such as screen aspect ratio (e.g. 16:9 or 4:3)
• View — various view options and a full screen preview option

In the upper left hand corner there is a preview window (black when nothing is loaded into Movie Maker).  Immediately to the right is the main work area, where the individual slides and videos you import will be displayed.

Importing Your Slides or Videos

Importing is very easy. You can import both videos and images.  I exported slides from PowerPoint, so I will important them into Movie Maker.

There’s a handy “Click here to browse for videos and photos” link in the center of the screen, so I used that and selected all of the slides I wanted to import.

Movie maker imports the slides and displays them in row at the top of the work area.  The first slide is automatically displayed in the preview window.

You can change the slide order by dragging and dropping slides into different positions in the work area.

Basic Edits

Set Slide Duration — When slides are imported Movie Maker assigns them a default duration of 7 seconds.  You’ll likely want to change this on a slide by slide basis, much as was done in PowerPoint.  Select a slide in the work area and then ensure Edit is selected on the menu bar.  Change the duration using the drop list or by directly typing in the duration in seconds.

Apply Animations — In Movie Maker, animations refer to transitions between slides as well as pan and zoom.

Transitions are applied at the beginning, or first appearance, of a slide and animations occur while the slide is displayed.  To apply a transition, first select the desired slide and then pick the transition from the ribbon bar.  If you hover the mouse over each transition you will see what it looks like in the preview window.  When you decide which one you want, select it and set the duration.

Animations are applied in the same way.  Select slide and then select the desired pan and zoom.  Pan and zoom options are all pre-set, and you select from a number of pan-only, pan and zoom in, or pan and zoom out options.

You have the option of applying a transition and/or animation to all slides at once, rather than setting them for each slide individually.

Remove a Slide from the Work Area — You can remove a slide from the work area by simply clicking on it and using the delete key.  The slide will be removed from the work area (though NOT deleted from your hard drive).

Add a Title “slide” — You can add a black title “slide” directly in front of any slide you want.  Simply select the slide (usually the first slide) and click Title in the ribbon bar.  A black “slide” with an editable text box appears in the preview area.  You can edit the text, including font, size, and animation.  This is useful if your first slide does not have a title (mine does). You can set the duration of both the text and of the “slide” itself.

That’s it for this post.  Next time I’ll talk more about captions, titling, and animation as I build out the trailer.

Thanks for reading, and I will see you again soon.