December 20, 2007

Episode 9: The Mixer

Have a ton of footage you want to show off but don’t want to make your friends sit through the boring stuff? With our easy-to-use mixer, you can crop your videos, cut parts out, combine them, and more!

In this episode of Ask Eric, learn how to use the mixer to make the most out of your video memories. Check it out:

The Motionbox Mixer is our super easy way to take a bunch of videos and combine them into one awesome movie. The Mixer allows you to trim your videos (so you can get rid of the boring stuff) and link them together (so multiple videos become one). Here's a quick walkthrough of how this simple tool works:

Step 1: Add Videos to the Mixer

First, decide which videos you want to add to the mixer. Go to "My Videos" and when you find a video you like, check the box next to it. When you've selected all your videos in a folder, head up to the top and click "add to mixer," then select "add and go to mixer," which will take you there.

Step 2: Rearrange Your Videos

In the mixer, you'll notice a few things right away: we've got the videos we selected at the top, a preview window over on the left to watch what you’re working on, and in the center of the window is the thumbnail viewer, for fine-tuning your video clips.

You can add as many videos as you want to the mixer, and select the order they will play in. To change the order of the videos, just drag and drop them around, and the arrangement changes instantly.

Step 3: Preview Your New Arrangement

The preview window is the place to easily check how you're doing. Just position the cursor and click the play button. The video plays, jumping from clip to clip as it moves through the whole mix, allowing you to see how the videos look together, back to back.

Step 4: Trim a Video

So let's say you like most of a video, but at the end it gets boring -and you want to cut that part out. Easy as pie. Head down into the main window, the thumbnail viewer, and select the part you like by dragging across. As you drag, the selection becomes highlighted in orange. Let go of the mouse and a menu pops up: click "Trim to Selection." The part you don't want becomes grayed-out, but the handy orange handles remain, which I can drag to fine tune my selection if you didn't get it perfect on that first try.

You can do this for every video - just drag them down and select the portions I'd like to keep. Remember that you can always go back and change a selection, too.

Step 5: Making It Perfect

Sometimes you want to make a selection that's very precise - for this you can use the tool called the "Thumbnail Slider," found on the upper right of the thumbnail window. Drag to the right to zoom in, and the number of images increases, allowing you to hone in on a specific moment. A good way to do it is to make a general selection in a zoomed-out view, then zoom in to get it just right.

You may find that sometimes you want to cut out a specific section of a video in the middle, but keep the beginning and the end. This is pretty easy too. First, select the beginning portion of the whole clip - right up to the start of the part you want to remove, and click "Trim to Selection." Now go back up to the video list, hold down the Control key (or Apple key on a Mac), and drag the video clip down: it automatically duplicates! Now you can hop down in the thumbnail viewer and find that duplicate, and make a new selection to include the end of the video, i.e. the part you want to keep. When you preview, it plays from one video to the next, seamlessly cutting that boring bit out. Sweet!

Step 6: Finish Your Movie!

When you're finished, publish the Mix as a new video, and your old videos remain safely saved on Motionbox. Your new video is just like any other video on Motionbox - you can view it, share it, make a flipbook out of it - and for premium members, you can *download* your mix as a new single file.

So that's the mixer in a nutshell. It makes it real easy to combine all the videos from one event, so you quickly and easily have a great way to preserve your memories! If you have any comments or questions, please contact me at askeric@motionbox.com. And happy mixing!