Projects & Movies: Managing longer films

Brenin wrote on 9/2/2009, 8:04 AM

This might seem a basic question, but I would like some assistance in understanding some of the Magix terminology. I wish to separate the video camera files on a video diary into a separate segment for each day of the diary, and editing this separately, rather than having all the files on one very long timeline. The files are AVCHD, and I have only 2 GB memory, so I wish to limit the number of files I am editing at any one time. Then, I wish to compile all the segments into one project file, after editing. I think Magix defines a "movie" as a component of a "project", but on opening Magix, I am only presented with the option to open an existing "project", and not an existing "movie". I cannot quite get my head around the structure of the whole project, when there are "projects" and "movies".

Could anybody clarify this business, and advise on the best workflow to divide longer films into manageable sequence lengths for editing, and then compiling all edited sequences into one final project before exporting or burning?

Comments

siglersmalz wrote on 9/2/2009, 10:40 PM

Let's see. A project is all of the elements in your MEP screen when you are working. This includes the video track (track 1) the video's audio track (track 2) and then any photos, music, effects (transitions, special effects, etc.) that you create.

Once you have your project created how you want it, then you produce a movie. You can either "export" your project to a computer movie format (mpeg, avi, quicktime, etc.) or you can burn a DVD which will play in a standard DVD player (non-computer).

As far as your work method, I'm sure someone could come up with a much better solution than me (my projects are usually very simple), but you might try creating a separate project for each day's diary. You can then export the project as a Magix video (.mxv format).

When you have enough daily .mxv movies to almost fill a DVD, you could then create a new project and pull the .mxv movies into it. That would allow you to burn your project to DVD and then free up hard drive space.

If you don't want to burn a DVD for watching on a TV, you could export your daily projects as mpeg, avi, or one of the other computer movie formats. Once that is done, you could just fill up a DVD with those files. This would use a DVD as storage media rather than for watching on TV.

Just to be clear, you export within MEP by clicking "File" "Export movie" then choosing the format you want to use.

Hope this helps.