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
No one likes watching movies on a small screen. While my 13inch macbook provides for some crisp resolutions it doesn’t exactly make for a cinematic experience when watching my favourite DVD. To this end I connected my macbook up to my 32inch LCD HDTV but alas I couldn’t at first find a way to display the movie on the television in fullscreen mode - I could only stretch the movie to fit the screen. As always though with a bit of perserverence the answer will present itself to you, and like most things there’s actually no difficulty involved; it’s purely a matter of knowing how…
Physically connecting a macbook to a HDTV (or monitor) is very easy: the macbook has a mini-DVI port, and HDTVs and computer monitors will have either a VGA, or HDMI port, or both. Mini-DVI is a rather inconvienient kind of port as seems to be only used by Apple so is a tad uncommon. Apple sell a way too short mini-DVI to VGA (female) cable; but a male-male VGA cable will complete the connection to you TV / monitor. The macbook automatically detects the second screen and will do whatever internal configurations are necessary to get the display working. It’s then just left up to you to set the resolution within System Preferences -> Displays. Just be sure that ‘Mirror Displays’ in Display -> Arrangement is unclicked (actually you can simply mirror the displays and run the movie in fullscreen on the macbook screen but it’s likely that the resolutions on both screens are not the same so you’ll be left with a border around the movie. Also you may wish to use one screen while playing the movie in the other so it’s best to unclick the ‘Mirror Displays’ option).
Once the second display is set up, open any movie in Quicktime and then go to View -> Present Movie in the menu toolbar. Here you can select which screen you want the movie to play in and at what size you want the movie to ‘Present at’ (probably Full Screen). Hit play and your move should zoom over to your second screen and begin playing - WALA!
Now this will only work while Quicktime is the active window. As soon as you change to another application, say a web browser, Quicktime will revert back to its original window. To get around this go into the quicktime preferences and select the Full Screen tab. At the bottom is the option to ‘Remain in full screen when player is inactive’. Turn this on and then you’ll be free to do anything you want on your macbok while your DVDs play fullscreen in all their glory!
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