windows vista secrets april 2007 phần 6 ppt

Figure 11-25: Videos that happen in Windows Photo Gallery stay in Windows Photo Gallery. Summary Although Windows Vista completely steps back from the shell-based photo management functionality that was provided in Windows XP, the new Windows Photo Gallery applica- tion more than makes up for it. Now, Windows users have a single obvious place to man- age, edit, share, and otherwise enjoy digital photos (and videos). Windows Photo Gallery is one of the better end user additions to Windows Vista. ࡗ 316 Part IV: Digital Media and Entertainment ࡗ ࡗ ࡗ 19_577048 ch11.qxp 11/29/06 8:17 PM Page 316 Making Movies and DVD Movies ࡗ ࡗ ࡗ ࡗ ࡗ ࡗ ࡗ ࡗ ࡗ ࡗ ࡗ ࡗ ࡗ ࡗ ࡗ ࡗ ࡗ ࡗ ࡗ ࡗ ࡗ ࡗ ࡗ ࡗࡗ ࡗ ࡗ In This Chapter Learning how to manage your digital movies in a variety of ways Using Windows Movie Maker to import content, edit video, and publish completed movies Editing TV shows and removing commercials with Windows Movie Maker Publishing your home movies, photo slide shows, and other videos to standard DVD movies Using Windows DVD Maker ࡗ ࡗ ࡗ ࡗ ࡗ ࡗࡗ ࡗ ࡗ ࡗ ࡗ ࡗ ࡗ ࡗ ࡗ ࡗ ࡗ ࡗ ࡗ ࡗ ࡗ ࡗ ࡗ ࡗ ࡗ ࡗ ࡗ Chapter 12 20_577048 ch12.qxp 11/29/06 8:18 PM Page 317 ࡗ 318 Part IV: Digital Media and Entertainment ࡗ ࡗ ࡗ J ust a few short years ago, the notion of consumers using PCs to edit their home movies into professional-looking productions was science-fiction. But then Apple came along with iMovie and proved that it was not just possible but that high-quality video editing tools could be done elegantly and in a user-friendly fashion. At that time, Microsoft had just released its first Windows Movie Maker tool, a crippled Windows Me application that was aimed only at the low end of the market. Today, in Windows Vista, Microsoft has a variety of tools for managing, viewing, editing, and publishing digital video of all kinds. You can even edit TV shows, removing commercials, and make your own movie DVDs. Let’s jump right in. Managing Digital Movies with Windows Vista Like Windows XP before it, Windows Vista includes a number of ways in which you can manage, view, and otherwise enjoy digital movies. You may recall that Windows XP included a special shell folder called My Videos. Actually, you will be forgiven for not remembering that — in Windows XP, the My Videos folder was curiously deprecated when compared to its My Documents, My Music, and My Pictures siblings. It didn’t appear on the Start Menu by default and couldn’t be added later. In fact, My Videos didn’t even appear in the shell until you started up Windows Movie Maker for the first time. In Windows Vista, the situation is only marginally different. The My Videos folder has been replaced by the new Videos folder, in keeping with Microsoft’s new shell folder naming scheme. It’s no longer a special shell folder, and it’s not located in the file system inside of Documents, as before. Instead, it sits under your Home folder alongside Documents, Music, Pictures, and other commonly needed folders. But it still doesn’t appear on the right side of Start Menu for some reason, and once again there’s no way to make it appear there. So how do you get to the Videos folder, you ask? In Windows XP, you could simply open My Documents, and there it was. In Vista, the easiest way is to open your Home folder, which is represented by your user name in the upper-right corner of the Start Menu. When you click that link, the Home folder opens in its own window, as shown in Figure 12-1. Inside, you’ll see the Videos folder. Secret In addition to Videos, Windows Vista maintains another folder for videos called Public Videos. This was called Shared Videos in Windows XP. Public Videos, as you might expect, is located inside the directory structure for the Public user account and is shared between all of the users configured for the current PC. How do you find it? Sadly, there’s no easy way. You’ll have to manually navigate to C:\Users\Public\Videos (by default) to find this folder. Secret 20_577048 ch12.qxp 11/29/06 8:18 PM Page 318 ࡗ ࡗ ࡗ Chapter 12: Making Movies and DVD Movies ࡗ 319 Figure 12-1: You’ll find the new Videos folder inside your Home folder. There’s also a Sample Videos folder that includes a set of short sample videos provided by Microsoft. There is a shortcut to this folder in your Videos folder, but the actual folder is located in C:\Users\Public\Videos\Sample Videos by default. tip Because of the proliferation of digital cameras with video-taking capabilities, you could very likely also find videos inside of your Pictures folder. When you copy pic- tures from a digital camera to Windows Vista, any videos on the camera will be copied to the same location, which is typically a subfolder under Pictures. Secret With all these different locations for finding digital videos, you might wonder what Microsoft was thinking. Although we could never claim to offer any insight along those lines, we can tell you that video management, like that of music and photos, has changed dramatically in Windows Vista. Although it’s still possible to navigate around the Windows shell and double-click movies to play them in Windows Media Player or another software tool, Microsoft actually expects that most of its users will instead use dedicated applications to manage and view digital movies. And one of those tools might just sur- prise you. We look at them all in the next few sections. 20_577048 ch12.qxp 11/29/06 8:18 PM Page 319 Watching and Managing Movies with Windows Photo Gallery The primary movie management tool in Windows Vista, believe it or not, is called Windows Photo Gallery. Why Microsoft didn’t choose to name this as Windows Photo and Movie Gallery is unclear, but the fact remains that you can organize and manage (and even play) all of the digital video on your system with this tool. Although we describe this application in detail in Chapter 11, it may be worth a short side-trip here to discuss how it works with digital movies specifically. By default, Windows Photo Gallery enables you to manage photos and videos together, and it’s designed to search the Pictures, Videos, Public Pictures, and Public Videos folders for video (and photo) content by default. (You can manually configure Windows Photo Gallery to search other locations as well; see Chapter 11 for more information.) When it comes to video, all the metadata application information works equally well with movies as it does with photos. That is, you can add tags, rating, and captions to movies, just as you can with photos. If you want to work just with movies in Windows Photo Gallery, select the Videos entry under All Pictures and Videos in the application’s View By pane. Now, you will see just videos in the Thumbnails pane, as shown in Figure 12-2. Figure 12-2: Even video files are displayed with nice thumbnail images in Windows Photo Gallery. ࡗ 320 Part IV: Digital Media and Entertainment ࡗ ࡗ ࡗ 20_577048 ch12.qxp 11/29/06 8:18 PM Page 320 As you mouse over individual videos, a pop-up window displays, showing a larger thumbnail, along with other information about the file, including its name, size, rating, and the date and time it was created. You can see this effect in Figure 12-3. Figure 12-3: Nice flyover effects give you more information about individual videos. ࡗ ࡗ ࡗ Chapter 12: Making Movies and DVD Movies ࡗ 321 If you want to discover where an individual video is located in the file system, right- click it in Windows Photo Gallery and choose Open File Location. Secret To play a video, simply double-click it. Curiously, videos opened in Windows Photo Gallery play in . . . Windows Photo Gallery — not Windows Media Player, as you might expect. This is undesirable for a few reasons, but the most obvious is that the video play- back window in Windows Photo Gallery is as large as the window, which is often larger than the original video, causing blurry resizing effects. As shown in Figure 12-4, Windows Photo Gallery isn’t the optimal place to play video files. 20_577048 ch12.qxp 11/29/06 8:18 PM Page 321 Figure 12-4: You can play videos in Windows Photo Gallery, but the application is better suited for just managing the files. From this window, you can add rating, tags, and captioning metadata if you so desire. What you can’t do is edit the movie — clicking the Fix toolbar button displays an unhelp- ful message. Our advice is to use Windows Photo Gallery to manage videos only, but to use Windows Media Player 11, described in the next section, for playback. We discuss editing digital movies later in this chapter as well. ࡗ 322 Part IV: Digital Media and Entertainment ࡗ ࡗ ࡗ You’re wondering whether you can play movies in Windows Media Player from within Windows Photo Gallery, aren’t you? The answer is a qualified yes. To trigger Windows Media Player playback from Windows Photo Gallery, don’t double-click a video thumbnail. Instead, select the video file you’d like to play and then choose Open and then Windows Media Player from the application’s toolbar. The real ques- tion, of course, is whether you can make Windows Photo Gallery do this by default. The answer, sadly, is no. Secret Watching and Managing Movies with Windows Media Player Most people think of Windows Media Player as a music player, but the truth is, Windows Media Player can also work with video and photo content as well. (As we discuss in Chapter 10, however, Windows Media Player only handles these types of content so that they can be synchronized with portable media players.) This capability isn’t new to Windows Media Player 11, the version that Microsoft ships with Windows Vista. However, 20_577048 ch12.qxp 11/29/06 8:18 PM Page 322 because videos do play natively in Windows Media Player 11, it’s possible that you might want to manage videos, to some degree, in the player as well. Like Windows Photo Gallery, Windows Media Player 11 is configured to automatically watch certain folders for digital media files, and those locations include, by default, your Videos and the Public Videos folders. No surprise there. To configure Windows Media Player to display just videos, select Video from the Categories button. As shown in Figure 12-5, the display will change to show just video thumbnails. Figure 12-5: Windows Media Player is just one of many places in Windows Vista from which you can manage digital movie files. From here, you can rate individual videos. But that’s about it. You can’t add tags or captions from within Windows Media Player. What you can do, of course, is simply play videos. That’s Windows Media Player’s strong suit, and you can use the player’s various controls to change the size of the video, display it using a nice full-screen mode, or even minimize the player to the system taskbar and watch it there while you get work done. ࡗ ࡗ ࡗ Chapter 12: Making Movies and DVD Movies ࡗ 323 One nice side effect of Windows Media Player’s capabilities is that you can actually create temporary or saved playlists of videos. That way you can trigger a collection of videos to play in order, or randomly. It’s not possible to do that from the shell or within Windows Photo Gallery. And if you save the playlist, you can access it from Windows Media Center, described in the next section. Secret 20_577048 ch12.qxp 11/29/06 8:18 PM Page 323 Watching and Managing Movies with Windows Media Center Windows Media Center is, of course, the premium environment in Windows for enjoying digital media such as photos, music, movies, and, yes, even live and recorded TV shows. But Media Center — which we discuss in detail in Chapter 13 — isn’t just for people with expensive home theater setups. There’s no reason you can’t use Media Center with a mouse and keyboard on your desktop PC or notebook. In fact, you may find it quite enjoy- able to do just that. ࡗ 324 Part IV: Digital Media and Entertainment ࡗ ࡗ ࡗ Windows Media Center is not available in all Windows Vista product versions. You have to be using Windows Vista Home Premium or Windows Vista Ultimate to get Windows Media Center. Secret As shown in Figure 12-6, Windows Media Center is a seamless, home theater–like appli- cation that works best full screen but can absolutely be enjoyed in a floating, resizable window alongside your other applications. Figure 12-6: Windows Media Center is a nice graphical front end to a variety of digital media experiences. 20_577048 ch12.qxp 11/29/06 8:18 PM Page 324 To use Media Center to manage your digital movies, navigate to the Pictures + Videos experience in the Start page and then choose Video Library. The first time you enter this area, Media Center will ask you if you’d like to choose other folders to watch for videos. If you’ve already configured either Windows Photo Gallery or Windows Media Player to watch particular folders, or you intend to only use the default folders for video content, you can select No; in that case, Windows Media Player uses the same database of watch folders as those other two applications. The Video Library experience, shown in Figure 12-7, provides a horizontally oriented grid of videos through which you can navigate by either name or date. To watch a video, sim- ply select it. Figure 12-7: In Media Center, videos include graphical thumbnails, making for a highly visual navigation experience. ࡗ ࡗ ࡗ Chapter 12: Making Movies and DVD Movies ࡗ 325 Although Windows Media Center offers tag-based navigation for music and photos, it does not do so for videos. To navigate your video collection by tag, you’ll need to use Windows Photo Gallery. Secret 20_577048 ch12.qxp 11/29/06 8:18 PM Page 325 [...]... Device WMV 1.0 Mbps 64 0×480 4:3 30 234 MB Windows WMV Media DVD Quality 3.0 Mbps 720×480 4:3 30 68 8 MB Windows WMV Media DVD Widescreen Quality 3.0 Mbps 720×480 16: 9 30 68 8 MB Windows Media Low Bandwidth WMV 117 Kbps 320×240 4:3 15 27 MB Windows Media VHS Quality WMV 1.0 Mbps 64 0×480 4:3 30 241 MB DV-AVI AVI 28 .6 Mbps 720×480 4:3 30 6. 44 GB If you’re running Windows Vista Home Premium or Ultimate, however,... version of Windows Vista you’re using All versions of Windows Vista support the settings types described in Table 12-2 ࡗࡗࡗ Chapter 12: Making Movies and DVD Movies ࡗ 341 Table 12-2: Video Settings Supported by All Versions of Windows Vista Setting Type Bit rate Resolution Aspect ratio Frames Per Second (FPS) Storage space required for 30 minutes of video Windows Media Portable Device WMV 1.0 Mbps 64 0×480... only available to users of Windows Vista Home Premium and Windows Vista Ultimate If you have a different Vista version, you will need to upgrade to one of these versions in order to use Windows DVD Maker Or, you could purchase one of the many third-party DVD maker applications on the market Note that any third-party package will be more sophisticated, but also more complex, than Windows DVD Maker There... Media and Entertainment Table 12-3 ࡗࡗࡗ (continued) Setting Type Bit rate Resolution Aspect ratio FPS Storage space required for 30 minutes of video Windows Media HD for Xbox 360 WMV 6. 9 Mbps 1280×720 16: 9 30 1.58 GB Windows Media HD 1080p WMV 7.8 Mbps 1440×1080 16: 9 30 1.8 GB You don’t have to be a high school AV geek to understand that bigger and more high quality video types will require more PC processing... format In Table 12-3, we describe the additional HD formats that Vista Home Premium and Ultimate will see Table 12-3: HD Video Settings Supported Only by Windows Vista Home Premium and Ultimate Setting Type Bit rate Resolution Aspect ratio FPS Storage space required for 30 minutes of video Windows Media HD 720p WMV 5.9 Mbps 1280×720 16: 9 30 1. 36 GB (continued) ࡗ 342 Part IV: Digital Media and Entertainment... with Windows DVD maker, described at the end of this chapter, DVD movies Secret You may have heard of something called Movie Maker HD (where HD stands for high definition, as in HDTV) Technically, Movie Maker HD is not a separate version of Movie Maker, but is rather a description of features that Movie Maker gains in certain Windows Vista product versions Here’s how it works All versions of Windows Vista. .. in Windows Movie Maker, you first need a collection of shortcuts to digital media files that will be used in your final video Windows Movie Maker can import a variety of video, audio, and picture files, and these files can be assembled however you like in your project’s storyboard/timeline Table 12-1 highlights the formats you can use with Windows Movie Maker Table 12-1: Media Formats Supported by Windows. .. around in the file system or delete them, Windows Movie Maker will not be able to use them in a saved project later Secret Using Windows DVD Maker Windows Vista, for the first time, includes an application for burning, or making, DVD movies As you might expect from a first effort, Windows DVD Maker isn’t a terribly sophisticated application, so the quality and variety of DVD movies you can make are fairly... Vista include Movie Maker, but only the versions in Windows Vista Home Premium and Ultimate can import from and publish to HD video sources You will need a fairly high end PC to manipulate such video, of course Windows Movie Maker is a relatively straightforward application, assuming you’re comfortable with video editing But even for the uninitiated, Windows Movie Maker is pretty easy to use You just... Windows Photo Gallery, you can select a group of photos or videos and then select Burn and then Video DVD from the toolbar From within Windows Movie Maker, you can choose DVD from the Publish To portion of the Tasks pane If you saved a DVD Maker project previously, you can double-click that project’s icon in the shell and pick up where you left off Or, you can simply find Windows DVD Maker in the Windows . Entertainment ࡗ ࡗ ࡗ Windows Media Center is not available in all Windows Vista product versions. You have to be using Windows Vista Home Premium or Windows Vista Ultimate to get Windows Media Center. Secret As. Movies with Windows Vista Like Windows XP before it, Windows Vista includes a number of ways in which you can manage, view, and otherwise enjoy digital movies. You may recall that Windows XP included. Movie Maker gains in certain Windows Vista product versions. Here’s how it works. All versions of Windows Vista include Movie Maker, but only the versions in Windows Vista Home Premium and Ultimate