ProjectVISUAL

It’s been a while since my last post I know, but I have legitimate reasons; first I had to move out of my accommodation in college, then I was in a car crash (images coming soon), and then I moved right back into my very same old accommodation! Phew! But everything’s back to normal now, no more 4 hour daily commutes, I’m back down to my usual 4 minutes! Anyway, on with the show: Quicktime. And music. With a watermark. How’s it done? Being able to post it onto your own website or onto YouTube would be nice also. First an example – here’s a high speed video I posted a while ago on YouTube (I’ll post is locally as soon a I feel like it). Now we have an idea what the finished video will look like. To be able to do this you must have Quicktime Pro, meaning you’ll have to splash out a bit of cash – it’s only about $30. The following instructions are for a mac – if you don’t have one you can pick one up for about $1099.

1. Inserting Music Into Your Video
First open you movie in Quciktime and check the running time. Next choose your music file (preferably one with a similar running time to your movie) and open it also in Quciktime. You should now have both movie and music open in separate Quciktime windows. Make sure both are are at their beginnings. Now with the music window selected, go to Edit -> Select All, and then Edit -> Copy, to copy the music. Next select the movie window and go to Edit -> Add To Movie. Your music should now be overlayed on your movie – easy! Play the move to be sure. You can also check that the music has been applied by going to Window -> Show Movie Properties. You’ll see that there is a sound track accompanying the original video track.

2. Adding A Watermark To Your Video
First make a suitable watermark. Any jpg image will do, just make sure it’s not too big compared to your video (the watermark can be scale down later anyway.) For me I used this:

You can open your jpg watermark in Quicktime, much like a movie or muisc. Copy it using Edit – > Select All, Edit -> Copy. Select your movie now and add the watermark using Edit -> Add to selection and scale. If everything went OK you should end up with something like this:

It might not be wheere you want it but we can move it around in a minute. Notice the two blue circles? There are two sliders inside them you can drag along the movies timeline if you want to segment the file. Make sure those sliders are at the start and end of your movie before adding the watermark, because it will only be visible between the sliders.

Next we need to resize / move the watermark to where we want it displayed. I wanted this one to be in the top rght of the video and make it a little smaller. Go to Window – > Show Movie Properties to bring up the following window:

There are three layers in this movie file: Video Track 1, Sound Track, and Video Track 2. We want video track 2 since it’s a JPEG format. Go to Visual Settings; there we can alter the ‘Scaled Size’ and ‘Offset’ values to scale and position the watermark anywhere on the video:

You can now save it as a .mov file, or if you want to post onto YouTube, save it as a DivX. Go to File -> Export, and select ‘Movie to DivX’ from the Export drop down menu. Then go to Options beside this and Advnced Settings. You can set the encoding performance under Codec and the audio format under Audio. OK everything and let Quicktime convert the file to DivX – it will take anywhere from a few minutes to an hour depending on your video size and encoding settings.

I’ve found that YouTube is a bit fickle when it comes to uploading movies – I’ve had .movs rejected even though they’re supposed to be OK. DivX files are always accepted. The intructions for posting on YouTube are made very clear so once the file is a DivX there should be no problems with uploading.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Quicktime, watermarks, music track, embed