CompuServe Messages

Tom, I had to put your "preview a clip" request on the back burner because I received a nice little surprise package from NoahJi's yesterday. I loaded MovieShop 2.1 last night and just had to do a little playing. I am pleasantly surprised at how well audio now works 🙂 The good news: audio is synced to the video — no more slight delay. Here are a few words from the ReadMe file: "Audio is the main and exciting new feature of 2.0, and has been changed in 3 significant ways. Of course you'll need the Toccata to enable these features. 1) Audio needs its own partition on another hard drive for best results. It will take much less hard drive space than the video. It's possible to dedicate a small partition on your system hard drive for the audio partition. IDE will work just fine for audio, but isn't recommended for video. An easy way to do this, is to use an available partition on you boot drive. Otherwise, You will have to reformat your system hard drive to set up this audio partition. The most convenient way to do this is to Amiga/DOS format your VLab Motion video partition, move the Workbench to this 'video partition' drive, reformat the system hard drive to generate an audio partition and a WB partition. Then move WB back to your newly reformatted system drive from the video drive. 2) Audio now always follows video. Block operations like cut, copy, and paste will keep the audio lip-synchronous with the video. The same is true of grouping and splitting video. 3) Audio is now in the timeline. Video files that are pulled into the timeline now contain audio. The audio files can also be put in the timeline and will appear as black bars. Audio can be separated from video scenes by dragging the scenes into the new 'Sounds' window. These audio files can then be used in the timeline in the same way as imported audio files. In the timeline you can define envelopes for the audio. An envelope describe the level of the audio. For example, if the envelope is defined as 50% at a certain point, the audio there would be at half its original volume. To define an envelope, double click on the audio or video scene and a new window will open. In this window you can define if you want the audio muted and you can define the envelope by marking and then splitting the audio. This is hard to define in words, but you can split an audio file into as many pieces as you want. You do this by clicking on split, and the mouse pointer turns into a cross. The audio is represented by a thin line ( by default is set at the top) of the white (video) or black (audio) timeline bar. Move the cross over the scene you want to change. If you click at the desired point in the audio, you'll see that the scene line is marked. You can now define the level of this mark by using the sliders. You can define all types of shapes, like troughs, ramps, plateaus, multiple up/down zig-zags, etc. Experiment with these and you'll soon learn about the power of this new feature. You can put as many audio scenes in the timeline as you want. If there is more than one, you'll have to render the audio using the new button in the timeline control. Audio rendering is significantly faster than video rendering." The bad news: as indicated above, you end up giving a hard disk partition to the audio part as well as a partition for the video part. Looks like I'm going to have to purchase another hard drive — first time in my life I've ever felt the the SCSI 7 drive capability might not be enough! You now also have to render the audio as well as the video, but you can now supposedly do audio mixing and import audio clips — so I figure it's a good trade-off <grin>. My playing last nite proved to me the audio syncing truely works. Digitized a video/audio clip (about 5 minutes worth) and broke it up into a few smaller segments (2 20 second clips and one that was the remaining time). I then used the timeline to reverse the order the 20 sec clips with a simple fade through transition. I used a lot of talking head video to ensure the audio sync was up to snuff. Worked like a dream! Audio stayed synced even through the rendered transition. Now we're talking NLE… EdV