Insight: Making a Broodwar Movie Part II

Welcome again to the next episode of „Gecko making a terrible movie“. On the last episode we learned that my neighbour is an asshole. And we learned the basics about how to record replays, how to make a catalouge of recordings and the importance of a good soundtrack.

Today we learn the very basics of Sony Vegas. Now we're getting to the promised pictures. So, open up Vegas and be ready to rock.

Project Options - Resolution

Once you opened Vegas create a new project (STRG+N / File → New). The most important thing here is the resolution. The standard resolution suggested by Sony Vegas is 720*480 pixels. This needs to be changed either way. StarCraft only has a resolution of 640*480 pixels. So, if you would add your recordings into the project they wouldn't fit and be re-sized, ultimatly causing black borders to the left and right of your video file. Depending on what you want to show you should therefore pick the resolution of 640*480 (for standard VODs and standard movies) or 1024*768 (if you recorded with the High Resolution Expander). Always chose the resolution of the 'biggest' recorded scene you have. For example, if you have 10 scenes that are recorded with 640*480 pixels, and 2 with 1024*768 choose 1024*768.

The red box shows where you can change the resolution. The yellow box needs to be set to „1,0000 (Square)“. I don't know what that is called in English, since I only use a German version. You need to pick that if you want to manually create high resolution screens, and if you don't select it the preview monitor won't show the actual render-result. More to that later. Click „OK“ to confirm and move on. You can always change the options later on, use „File → Preferences“ (or ALT+Enter)

Creating Tracks

What you see now is the virgin version of your project. Nothing happened yet and it all looks a little confusing. It isn't, trust me. When you take a look at my screen shot I labled a view things you need to know. First is the green boxed window, currently black. The position of the window can be different in different version of Vegas, but it's alwayas around somewhere. It is the preview monitor, that helps to get an idea how your project looks like in the final movie. Depending on your PC you can change the preview from the option „Draft“ to „Optimal“ in the drop down menue. When you use the buttons in the yellow box you can activate the preview monitor and see what the current project looks like. If you haven't selected „1,0000 (Square)“ the preview monitor can fuck up – at least in older versions of Sony Vegas.
The blue box shows your explorer. You can see images, video and audio files there. Those are your „raw“ files, things you haven't edited yet. With the blue marked buttons you can preview them, if you don't know what they look like.
The yellow box features your project. Everything that is dragged & dropped from the blue box in there will be part of your movie. To get a preview of that you can press the yellow marked buttons – it will be shown in the preview monitor.

Most files can be simply dragged&dropped from the blue box in the grey area of the yellow box below. That does work for audio files in every Sony Vegas version, but not neccessarily for all video files.
The yellow area appears completely grey for now, since nothing was inserted at all. You will need to create different tracks. There are two different kind of tracks: audio and video tracks. You can generate them by making a right click somewhere in the grey area and chosing „Insert video track“ or „Insert audio track“. I recommend to place at least one audio track and three video tracks (two video tracks for VODs). The result should be something like this:

Audio Tracks

We will start with editing the audio files, since it's the most important thing ever. Always add the complete(!) soundtrack before you start editing your movie. With soundtrack I mean all songs you have. You can always add unit sounds later on, those aren't 'so' important. Simply drag&drop the files from the blue box as shown in the picture above.

Leave a little gap between the first song / sound and the border to the left. Depending on which codec you use you might want to add a test picture at the start to avoid a pixel mash-up right from the start. If you done it correctly your project should look something like this:

Here we have our first problems. You might not want a complete song, but only parts of it. So, simply select the parts you don't want by left-clicking, hold the left mouse button and scroll to the start of what you want to have again (or the end / beginning of the song). The selection now will appear blue underlayed in Vegas. Right click in that selection and chose „delete“. Songs/Sounds/video files can be moved to left/right simply by clicking somewhere in them and dragging them to the right position.

Fading

Songs sound strange when they start out from nowhere. Fading them in and out is a good way to avoid that problem. If you chose a fade-in the song slowly gets louder, if you do a fade-out songs slowly fade away. If you combine both, fade-in and fade-out you can create a transition between two songs, avoiding breaks in the flow or short pauses in between tracks.
To fade songs you move your cursor in the left upper corner of the audio file and watch out for the fade symbol. It looks a little like a curve. Once that symbol appears you simply hold left-click and drag the fade curve to the position you want to have. A right-click into the fade-curve and selecting the option at the top, you can select different types of curves – depending on how fast you want the track to fade. Here is a little picture:

Fading can be used for Video Tracks in the same way. Keep that in mind, this will be important later on. If you put two video files on top of each other, just like the two songs in the picture above, and fade one in and one out, the recordings seem to slowly transition into one another. Looks quite cool sometimes.

Camera Position

Once you dragged some video file into a video track, you can change it's camera. When I say „Camera“ I mean the parts of the record you want to show. You can zoom in, cut away the menue on the bottom, or do a movement of the screen.

To do this import a video file into your track and press either the button for the „Panorama/Cropping“ or right-click into the file and chose the option.

Now you can see what you actually show in the movie. The squared window with the huge F in the center is your selection. You can resize the window like an image in word. Via drag&drop you can change the position of the window. When you press CTRL while you resize you can change the window proportion. I recommend to resize the window in a way the menue at the bottom is completely cut of. When that is done you can save a preset. If you enter any name in the drop down menue (blue box) and press the disc symbol you create a preset. Presets are nice, since you don't have to resize each file all the time. You simply open up a project and select the preset you want from that drop down menue and you're done. This works both for the pan/crop and effects later on. So remember it.

In the yellow box you can see a line that is labled as „Position“. It resembles the time line. The strange squares are anchor points. You can create a new anchor point by double clicking on the spot you want it to have. Once an anchor point is created you can move it to the spot you want it to have.
If you create two anchor points at the start and at the end, you can create a zoom. If the first anchor points shows the whole screen and the second one only the hatch (in my screen), the camera would do a zoom in the final movie. The zoom is faster for closer anchor points.

Creating a constant border

We're doing that guide and follow a certain scheme, you can't yet recognize. I will now describe a few things that are a little confusing, and you might not know why I am doing it. To explain it: you can use more than fades for video files. You can transition them, like using flashes and others. If you don't use the following technique those transitions will fail. In addition differently pan/crops of two video files can cause strange edges and annoy the viewer. So we are going to create a constant border, called „Latter Box“.

The first step for you is to pick the largest (meaning with the highest resolution) video file you have. Drag it into a video track and resize the camera in a way, that you can only see the the gaming window, not the menue for units at the bottom. Switch back to your main window. Now here is the first, REALLY important thing: you need to be absoultely sure that the project settings are correct. Then change the option in the preview monitor to „Optimal (FULL)“. Scroll into your video file, so you can see a picture of the scene in the preview monitor. Then press the disc symbol and save the picture somwhere.

Now you will need either MS Paint, Gimp or Photo Shop. Open the picutre you just created with the program you have. Now, you will see two black borders, one on top of your screenshot and one at the bottom, framing the acutal scene. Now pick a solid color, I recommend dark blue or neon green. Make a green/blue square all over your actual scene, and make sure that it doesn't cover the black borders. The new called Screenshot is called „Latter Box“ and will create fixed borders for your movie. You can polish it up with Photo Shop if you want, but you don't need to. Like drawing tribals into the black borders, or dragons or something you like (a giant penis if you want). Now switch back to Vegas.

Now create a new video track on top of all other video tracks. This track has to remain on top every time. Put the screenshot with the solid color in that track and expand it all over your project – from the first second up to the last second.

Click the Button for „Video FX“ (this is the place to get effects!) or right click and select the option shown in the screen shot below.

Select the 'Sony Chroma Keyer' by pressing „Add“ or double clicking on it, then press OK. You will now see the effect options. Chose the symbol I showed in the yellow box and left-click into the colored box the arrow points to. Close the window and you're done.

Explanation:
What you did here is the blue screen technique for noobs. The effect „Sony Chroma Keyer“ is a powerful tool and can be used for different things. We did now set the Color with the RGB Code (?) '0-0-255' as transparent. The black borders remain on top of each scene and will never change, no matter what you do to the files in the tracks that are below. The dark blue color however will be blended out, so you can see every video file in another track that has same position as the solid blue color. Fancy trick and very helpful.

We're now at the end of Part II of my blog. You learned a few basic things, and can already do little experiments on your own. You can't do too fancy stuff, but prolly enough to polish up your VODs a little. More will follow soon!

Don't hesitate to ask me if you have problems with the things I explained to day. HF!

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