What is Movica?

Movica is a Graphical User Interface (GUI) that uses two widely used editing engines viz. asfbin and mpgtx. These engines do not have GUIs for less advanced users. Movica is aimed at filling that gap. It can be used to edit Windows Media files (.wmv, .asf) and MPEG-1 / MPEG-2 files (.mpg, .mpeg). Starting with version 0.6 you can even edit .flv and .rm movies. Editing of some audio files (.wma and .mp3) is also supported

Software requirements

You will need to have the following software with you.

  • Movica
  • .NET framework 2.0
  • mpgtx - for editing MPEG movies (Installed as part of Movica)
  • asfbin - for editing Windows Media movies (Installed as part of Movica) - You can only use this for non-commercial purposes

Installation

Movica is a open source software that can be downloaded from either

There are a lot of other web sites that might mirror the installers but the ones listed above are the most current.

The installer should run without issues and might prompt you to install .NET framework 2.0 if you do not have it on your computer already. This will be very rare since the Windows Update utility would have installed it already.

You can now start Movica from the entry in your Start menu

 

Editing

We can now start editing movies. The Open option in the File menu will present you with a thumbnail view of the supported file formats

Let us edit the Ice Age trailer. Let us say we want to increase the edginess of the glacier episode but want to spare Scrat the stomping by the mammoth. We alter the montage of the glacier scene by interspersing the glacier cracking with Scrat's running. [Just for the record, my intention here is not to infringe on the creative rights of Fox studios or to derive some evil pleasure in extending Scrat's unfortunate predicament. ;)]

Tip:You can open a file by dragging it onto Movica from Windows Explorer. I usually start the dragging and switch applications with [Alt + Tab] to bring Movica to the foreground and drop it there.

1. Select scenes as you play the movie
The first step is to select the scenes we want. You do this by playing the movie and placing markers at the beginning and end of the scene that you want. The graphic below shows the buttons you use to do that. The shortcut keys are really helpful here since they allow you to select your scenes without taking your eyes off the movie. As with other illustrations in this guide, the shortcut keys are shown in square brackets.

As the movie is being played you can mark out the parts you want. In our case, I have kept a few scenes from the beginning and another piece towards the end.


2. Copy scenes that you want repeated
To get our glacier scene we copy the first part and paste it in the selections list. This can be done as shown below using the right click pop-up menu. (screenshot taken from Help; does not show our current movie)

Now we have all the raw material we need.

3. Fine tune the selections
When you highlight any one of the selections, you will notice a tuning bar appear at the bottom. This has two sliders to allow you to adjust the starting and end point of the selection.


Using these sliders you can adjust our segement as shown below

Trim the second selection to isolate the crack progression scene


Fine tune the others to add or remove any frames that might have been missed in the 'rough cut'

Tip: Using the arrow keys with the Shift key you can quickly highlight the selections and change the start and end points. But then this is a matter of preference.

4. Proof the edit
Now that we have made the edits as we needed it is time we do a proof test. You can do so by using the Play pulldown menu.

In our case we want to play the the selected parts.

Warning: Final edits may differ slightly since the editing engines use key frames (usually scene boundaries) as the splicing points. So try and see if your edits are close to scene boundaries and always check your edited file

5. Finalize the edits
Having satisfied ourselves with the proof, we can now finalize the edits. The 'Trace' tab will show you the results of the output. We are interested in looking at a 'Success!' message in the end. There is a lot of detail that is also printed out. This can help you out in case things go wrong and you want to look for clues.

Well in our case, things have turned out well. [Inspite of what you may think of the artistic qualities of our montage]

That's all folks!

Movica a basic and simple editor. In case you would like to know more please use the SourceForge suggestion page. Or better still, feel free to contribute to the documentation on the SourceForge documentation page.

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