What are MoviClips?

MoviClips are a little bit like play lists only that instead of having multiple movie files it has multiple scenes / selections from the movie that you will like to be played. These files are used to play the movie at a later time. This could be useful if

  • You need multiple and different edited versions
  • You are having difficulty in getting just the right edits because of key frame boundaries
  • You would rather keep the original movie as well. Saves disk space in those cases since the MoviClip files are quite tiny. I apologize in advance, if disk space is not an issue for you and this benefit seems like a petty reason.

Why

Honestly, it was because our toddler asked me to. For those of us who have been fortunate enough to interact with children brought up in the digital age, it is clear that they want to see what they want to see – instantly.

I ended up editing little movies out of larger ones so that ours could get the various combinations that he liked. I decided to just keep the information about the scenes and have the player be a virtual editor – just playing the edited parts.

Of course, you are now limited to the playback capabilities of Movica. So this approach will not work if you want to play the movie in your favourite player.

How do you use this?

Select scenes just like you would for editing. See the guide to editing movies.

Save the MoviClip – Using the save icon on the selected scene list (on the right side of the utility)

 Later when you are ready to play the clips

  1. Open the MoviClip file using the toolbar on the selection scene list. Use the appropriate play button to play the clip. [Holding the mouse pointer on the buttons will show you what the button does]
  2. Drag and Drop the file from Windows Explorer to the Movica window.
  3. Double Click on the MoviClip file in Windows Explorer - This is the least recommended method for the Beta 4 release since it will start a separate Movica window for each click. Will be addressed in future releases.

 Note:
Make sure that you do not change the location of the movie after the saving the MoviClip. Movica will at best try and look for the movie in the same folder as the MoviClip file. So you will always be fine if you keep the movie and the MoviClip files in the same folder when you move them around.