When you choose the Save As Movie command, either from a browser or from the Animation Window, the Save As Movie window will appear.
The Save As Movie Window
- Create movie from lets you choose whether you want to make a movie from the thumbnails or from the original images. Be careful if you choose Original Images because if there are a lot of frames, and the frames are large, the movie file will be enormous and take a long time to create. For example, a 640x480 movie of 1088 Frames (45 seconds) using the "Cinepak" codec took about 2 hours to create and compress on a P433 computer and required 900MB of temporary space, resulting in a 72MB movie file.
- Filename is the file name of the video file you want to create. Since the program only creates AVI files at present, this name should have an AVI extension.
- Type specifies the type of movie. At this time, it is always Video for Window (AVI). The program creates a simple AVI file containing one AVI stream and no sound.
- Frames/sec allows you to specify the speed that you would like the movie to play back at, in frames per second (fps). As a rough guide, cinema film runs at 24 fps, PAL video at 25 fps, and NTSC video at 30 fps.
- In the Comment field you can enter a comment to be inserted in the AVI stream. This could be, for example, a copyright message.
- The Compress option enables the compression phase. If this option is not checked, the movie will not be compressed and will probably be very large and high quality. In this case, the temporary folder will not be used, but you must, of course, have sufficient space on your hard drive for the full-frames uncompressed movie.
- Folder for temporary uncompressed file is required when the Compress option is enabled. In this case, the movie is created in two stages. First it is saved to a temporary file in full-frames format, i.e. uncompressed. Then that file is compressed to create the final file with the name you specified above. The uncompressed file can be really huge, and this box allows you to enter a drive (and folder) where you know you have plenty of disk space. If you only have one partition on your hard drive, you can leave the default here, which is set to the value of your TEMP environment variable. This is usually
C:\WINDOWS\TEMP or something similar. The area below this box shows how much space is available and how much is required. This may take some time to add up (although you don’t have to wait for it), and when the final value is displayed you will see a 'green light' icon.
- The Save button begins saving the movie. If the compress option is checked, you will first be presented with the standard Windows compression dialog from which you can choose the type of compression to be used.
Note: The standard Windows compression dialog lists the various codecs that you have on your computer. Some codecs may be missing, and others may actually crash when PMIO tries to use them. The reason for this is unknown; PMIO uses standard Windows functions to do the compression and any strange behaviour is probably not a bug in PMIO, but a peculiarity of a particular codec or its installation.
- See also:
- The Animation Window
The Main Browser
What is a Codec?
