Date: Thu, 22 Jan 1998 03:09:05 -0500 From: Collins Subject: [IML] Quest: Framerate reduction and a sample avi I know I have seen questions about framerates and playback speeds in the past, so I thought I'd post this little note. I recently found a free avi editor from MS, no less, that will do these things and more. If you don't mind using a 16bit application (I don't think there is a 32bit version) Videdit does quite a lot and costs nothing as far as I can see.(There is no registration information in the file, and I downloaded it from either zdnet.com or download.com, one of the two, where it was labeled as shareware) SOme features include: adding sound-very elementary, as there is little interface to match sound to frame and no mixing abilities, but you can lay down some music or sound effects with your animation change the playback speed- pretty handy, you can create an avi at 30fps then reduce the speed to 15fps, allowing for animating on two's change the actual framerate- you know from like 30fps to 25 fps- therefore you can make a pal video from ntsc(only speculating here, I woudn't know if it worked or not, as I don't have any pal equipment :)) basic editing- import clips from other avi's with mark in and out, cut copy and paste frames, extract only a portion of the avi crop and resize- the cropping tool is very cool, use it just like you would in photoshop, resize, well, it resizes compression quality preview- allows you to actually see what the frames will look like before you compress them- neat! Seems like a useful utlity for avi's, I like it. I posted a sample of what I used it for at http://www.accucomm.net/~collins1/weird5.zip It's kinda hefty at 4.4 megs, so beware. Took me about 20 minutes to upload it at 33.6. There's not a link on my pages, because I'll be changing them very soon. A little information about the avi file- Original was 480 X 320, 300 frames and weighed in at about 10 megs(created in IFW 1.3.4). I slowed the speed down to 12fps and reduced the framerate to 12 fps also. I added a wav file for sound effect, then cropped to a 480 X 207 adding a little movie screen drama to the animation. Playback time went from 10 seconds to 25 seconds and when I saved the file it was about 5.5 megs.