Full screen Montage Movie Maker 2 project

source videos & picture credits - European Space Agency

This is for the really adventurous !

Taking it’s cue from a recent post I made about a special montage effect I’d created using Picasa, and a discussion on the windowsmoviemakers.net forum, I thought I’d take the idea one step further and go full screen. Although the montage will require a little more effort to create without the automisation of Picasa 2, I felt that the results and possibilities were well worth it.

So how can we go about creating the full screen montage effect in Movie Maker 2?

A starting point is the creation of a high quality montage image – something like this one. There are many ways to create such an image, but I will focus on the method I used which utilises free software and is easy to action.

Firstly I create a project folder that contains 9 high quality source images . Next I resize all these pictures to a pixel size of 800 x 600. This will eventually result in an overall picture size of 2400 x 1800 when pieced together. While possible to individually resize each picture in a graphics editor , I choose to speed things up and process them as a single batch.

The software I use for this task is the free Multiple Image Resizer.NET
This is a beautiful little application that’s easy to use and perfect for resizing a folder full of pictures in one hit. I Simply import the project folder, set the picture size to 800*600, select an output folder, then hit Go – nice and simple !


The next task is to assemble the 9 re-sized images in a grid and save those as a unified montage image. For this task I use another excellent software - the vector drawing INKSCAPE. By dragging the project pictures in to a specially prepared INKSCAPE template it is possible to easily snap each picture in to place and shuffle them about. Once all pictures are assembled on the grid and a specially prepared border placed over the top (included in the template), I export the montage as a png image using the "page" setting within the INKSCAPE export screen

With the montage picture now in my hands the effect is half complete. To finish off, some customised transitions and PIP+ zoom effects are applied (available for download below) within the MM2 timeline to act upon the montage image.

The movie is then saved and - VOILA !

At the time of writing the custom effects I have created consist of a few transitions and PIP+ zoom effects (available for download below). I hope to add to the list over time.

A word of warning - when saving the video within movie maker 2 using these transitions be sure to save at a pixel ratio of 4x3 - I would suggest the "High Quality Video Large " setting. The PAL AND NTSC settings are not true 4x3 settings (even though the dialogue suggests so within MM2) and if used will result in the transitions and montage being out of alignment

Some of the transitions and zooms listed below were featured in the demo video. More effects will be added over time for montage use.

_________________________________

MONTAGE 3x3 (Transitions) appear as:
MONTAGE 3x3 (2 stage grows)
MONTAGE 3x3 (2 stage shrinks)
MONTAGE 3x3 (3 stage grows)
MONTAGE 3x3 (9 stage grows)
MONTAGE 3x3 (9 stage rapid)

Download

_________________________________

(A registered version of the pip+ plugin must be installed for the below zooms to work )

MONTAGE 3x3 ZOOMS (Video effects) appear as:
MONTAGE 3x3 MULTIZOOM
MONTAGE Zoom in A
MONTAGE Zoom in B
MONTAGE Zoom in C
MONTAGE Zoom in D
MONTAGE Zoom in E
MONTAGE Zoom in F
MONTAGE Zoom in G
MONTAGE Zoom in H
MONTAGE Zoom in I


Download (A registered version of the pip+ plugin must be installed for these zooms to work)

If you wish to comment on these effects please post your comments below or visit the Windows MovieMaker Forums where I am sometimes found.