Cambridge International AS & A Level Information Technology: Topic Support Guide
Cambridge International AS & A Level Information Technology: Topic Support Guide
The task guides show generic techniques but all the work is done using Windows Movie
Maker®. This application was chosen because it is likely to be the most widely available as
it is bundled or available as a free download in all versions of Windows. Windows Movie
Maker has all the tools and features necessary for all practical work for the exam
specification.
The techniques and skills learned using Movie Maker will be transferrable to other video
editing applications. Probably the only difficulty with using other applications will be finding
the tools and menu items in other workspaces.
Task 1
Digital video editing applications are designed to work with downloaded camera footage in
order to publish a post-production version of a movie in formats like MP4, WMV and AVI etc.
This task is intended to give learners some experience of one of the most important video
editing features but we will have to use a published movie. Unfortunately, this makes the
stages in the task a little less clear than when editing camera footage. Learners should
concentrate on the methods and tools used and not on achieving a perfect result.
When working on this task it is advisable to save your work as a project and also as a movie.
The project file keeps discrete clips and this makes it easier to amend and add additional
features.
The quickest way to load the movie is to drag and drop the file into Movie Maker (as shown
on the image below).
At this point it is clear that Movie Maker has not displayed each clip properly in the
timeline/storyboard. It seems to have taken a random snapshot and used this for each clip.
(This seems to be the case for many video editing applications.)
Video editing task guide 9626 Sub-topic 10b Video editing – Task 1 1
When we play the video we can see that it is a countdown from 15 to 0 but we should be
able to spot that the numbers 3 and 4 are in the wrong order.
(2) The sequence of the countdown is wrong. Split the movie into parts that enable the
numbers to be re-ordered.
Timeline or storyboard
Preview window
You can use the control buttons to move one frame at a time to find the first frame for ‘3’ and
click the ‘Split’ menu item.
Some fine control is needed here otherwise single frames can be left attached to the wrong
clip. Use the ‘Next frame’ and ‘Previous frame’ control buttons to move back and forth until
you are sure you have found the first frame of the ‘3’.
2 Video editing task guide 9626 Sub-topic 10b Video editing – Task 1
We then need to split the video between the ‘3’ and the ‘4’ and then the ‘4’ and the ‘2’.
The “3” and the “4” frames should now be in separate clips. (4 clips in total)
Video editing task guide 9626 Sub-topic 10b Video editing – Task 1 3
We can now drag and drop the clips into the right order.
The clips are now in the right order. Play the video to confirm the correct countdown
sequence. Do not worry about a polished result as understanding the method is the most
important issue.
4 Video editing task guide 9626 Sub-topic 10b Video editing – Task 1
(3) Remove the leading dashes (--) and replace with a title frame with ’15 second timer’ as
the text
The first clip runs from the dashes to ‘5’ that is 12 seconds
long.
preview window
Make sure the playhead is at the start of the movie and
click the ‘Trim’ tool icon.
Move the left slider control until the first frame of the ‘15’
clip shows in the preview window. (The start point box
should show about one second.)
At this point you can see the trim will be from about one second to the end of the 12-second
clip.
Video editing task guide 9626 Sub-topic 10b Video editing – Task 1 5
You can now replace with a title frame with ‘15 second timer’ as the text.
On the Text Tools tab, set the text duration to five seconds.
6 Video editing task guide 9626 Sub-topic 10b Video editing – Task 1
(5) Add a Zoom effect to the title frame.
(6) Save the movie in an aspect ratio of 4 : 3 with a size of 640 × 480 in .mp4 format.
Video editing task guide 9626 Sub-topic 10b Video editing – Task 1 7