Smartmovie - movie making the easy way
Sometimes you can afford to spend a lot of time on an edit. Sometimes you want to get everything just right, and need to work over every cut again and again until everything is perfect.
Sometimes you don't. Sometimes, time is the most important factor and what you really need is something you can
show in 10 minutes time. When that happens, you'll be glad of Smartmovie. Smartmovie is Pinnacle Studio's instant videomaking tool. With it, you can simply select a series of clips and let Studio do the rest, trimming and arranging them, cutting them to music and even adding effects and titles - all automatically.
If you don't think that's possible, read on.
How to use it
To use Smartmovie, capture or import your clips in the normal way, then grab the clips you want to be in your edit from the album and drag them to the timeline. Import some music and drag that to the timeline in the music track (make sure your music is around half the length of your video clips so that Smartmovie will have something to work with).
Now select Make Smartmovie from the Toolbox menu, and choose a style from the dropdown list at the top left. Type the text for your opening and closing credits into the boxes underneath.
Finally, click the Create button and Studio will produce an edit of your footage.
Styles
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Smartmovie offers a range of different styles - each time you select one, a description appears in the bottom right box. The styles range from fast paced rock video edits where there's a cut every couple of seconds through to slow motion dreamy montages in which shots mix slowly from one to the next.
You can use Smartmovie on still images as well as video clips (simply by dragging them to the timeline) and you can combine still and moving images if you wish to.
If you want to specify the order in which your clips appear, simply uncheck the "random order" checkbox. Your movie will then be cut in whatever order you place the shots on the timeline.
What if you want a bit more control?
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Smartmovie is all very fine, but it won't always produce exactly what you were looking for. It doesn't know the difference between one shot and another, and it doesn't know which images are the most important to you.
However, that's not a problem because once the software has finished cutting your footage, it's arranged on the timeline just like any other edit. In other words, once it's done, you can go in and tweak its results just as you would any other piece of editing. You can delete or insert shots, swap transitions around, or change the order in which shots appear in exactly the same way as if you'd edited it yourself.
This is perhaps the best feature of Smartmovie because it means you can instantly create a rough edit, then alter it as much as you like. Whether you've got 5 minutes to spend on an edit or a day, it's up to you.
*Offer ends 30 April 2009.