Plug ins

heather-reid wrote on 9/20/2009, 8:09 AM

OK I was very kindly told about a super plug in that can change your video to paintings etc. Now believe it or not have used this and boy it is good but if I try to move the sliders (for bigger brushes etc.) the program crashes. I'm sure somebody can tell me what I'm doing wrong. I really want to use this and perhaps I don't know enough about it so if anybody can help I would be so grateful

Comments

ralftaro wrote on 9/23/2009, 7:08 AM

Hi again,

Unfortunately, it looks like the plug-in I recommended is not very compatible with Movie Edit Pro. As I said, I had never tried that particular plug-in in MEP before. Now I checked it out and I believe I saw the problem you're having. That's a bummer, cause the plug-in does produce pretty neat results. I suppose that's to be expected with third party plug-ins. You might always find the occasional one that doesn't want to play ball. For the time being, my only solution to the problem is to work around it by using VirtualDub (which the plug-in was originally designed for) to apply the effect to the clip that you want it on.

http://www.virtualdub.org

See below for my results on some sample clips from the Movie Edit Pro 15 demo project. :-)

ralftaro wrote on 9/23/2009, 10:14 AM

Hi again,

If you haven't done so yet, unpack and install VirtualDub somewhere on your system, so you can run it. It doesn't really have a proper installer. You just need to create a folder for it somewhere in your program files and unpack the contents. There will be a "plugins" sub directory in the VirtualDub directorty. That's where you can place the cartoonizer plug-in (i.e. the actual VDF file) to be detected and used by VirtualDub later.

Once this is done you can start up VirtualDub and load your source video file via the "File" menu. Then, pick the "Filters" command in the "Video" menu of the program to add the desired filter from the list and configure its parameters. You can play it back in VirtualDub to see the outcome, but more complex effects like the cartoonizer will definitely be pretty slow on most system and cannot be previewed in real-time. You can render and save the resulting file via the "Save as AVI" function in the "File" menu again. Depending on what your workflow looks like and what you want to do with the output from VirtualDub (e.g. whether it's your final file or whether you want to bring this back into Movie Edit Pro for editing), your might want to adjust the used output codec accordingly via the "Compression" option in the "Video" menu. The default uncompressed codec should be pretty good for re-importing and editing in Movie Edit Pro, but it will create gigantic files on your hard drive when rendering.

Good luck!