DIGITAL STORYTELLING: The editing process for a multimedia presentation

Hi there,

I would be interested in an in-depth discussion on tips/suggestions on the actual editing process during the making of a multimedia presentation (mainly looking at interweaving video and sound in a seemless, quality manner)

Using resources from the post about free tools (Microsoft Windows Movie Maker, and Audacity) and available sound resources on the web, I've tried playing around with inserting video clips / splitting / using effects, transitions with movie maker, and editing sound recordings with Audacity.

However, I'd like to hear about tips for syncing up recordings in Audacity for importing into Movie Maker as the narration piece in Movie Maker appears rather limited. Also any tips for how to edit a video together well would be helpful.

I realize that there should be a script/plan to figure out ahead of time how a movie should go, but I'd like to hear about how to implement such a plan using these tools mentioned.


Thankyou for any feedback.



Andrew.

Andrew,
I'm not sure I understand your questions.
You want to know how to import audio and video into Windows Movie Maker (WMM)? Or sync it up?

We would suggest recording your voiceover audio in Audacity and importing that into WMM. Then you can arrange your pictures or video in the timeline to fit your voiceover.

Again, start with a finite file first (like your voiceover) and fit infinite files (like pictures) to that.

The other questions you're asking about interweaving video and sound in a seemless, quality manner are topics that people go to film school for. I don't mean to not answer your question, but "quality" manner is pretty vague. I'm not really sure what you're having trouble with. Putting a transition on a clip of video to make it fade out? Making the sound fade out along with the video?

Most of these questions can be best answered in the help docs for the software you're working in. Though I must say that free products like WMM don't allow for a whole lot of editing freedom.

-Daniel

Hi there,

Thankyou for your reply. I may have misunderstood one of the aims of this training, which I understood would talk about the technical aspects of Digital Storytelling, which I would imagine would cover the use of the software itself and implementing creation of a multimedia presentation. However it sounds like this would have to occur in a training workshop in a very different kind of forum.

So far I've already been able to record items in Windows Movie Maker, and Audacity and importing items from that. However, that's me playing around with the software, and I've no idea if I'm doing that the way a professional would go about the process.

Regarding Sound Synchronization: I was just looking for tips on how to make sure items are synchroized correctly as the built in Narration in Windows Movie Maker is very limited.

For instance, let's assume you video someone talking on camera, but you record the audio through another device for better sound quality. Then the question would be are there any tips to help import the sound and synchronize the speaker's video footage with the audio without just manually pulling a wavefile up and down until it looks right.

Regarding: Video editing

Are there any tips and suggestions on how to take recorded footage and then go about breaking that up to edit in a way that looks better than just a typical camcorder recording. It looks like there is a lot of functionality in Windows Movie maker to make use of effects/transitions, so it would be nice to know of any tips, tricks, methods to go through when carrying out editing footage into a final presentation.

I understand there is a lot in this topic which is very broad, which is why I was hoping for a wider discussion on it.

Andrew.

I thought I'd take a look on the web to see if there were any tutorials out there that dealt with actual tips with software and the editing process to find what I was after.

I found a great site where the person really seems to know what he is talking about. It looks like he and his brother wrote some software (freeware) to deal with many issues of synchronization and other editing areas.

http://nickyguides.digital-digest.com/audio-synch.htm

It goes into great depth in understanding the technical challenges posed and how to deal with these issues with great tips. It deals with the AVI format.

They also have a section on special effects that includes some other freeware for the basic ones, and talks about using Adobe Premier for more advanced effects.

Regards,



Andrew.