Manipulating videos for Articulate

This is my experience trying to manipulate a video file in Articulate's Video Encoder. 

I did some research on the Articulate E-Learning Heroe's site at various points in this process, but couldn't find any articles on this kind of editing. So I thought I would share the limitations I experienced and the solution our team ultimately came up with.

 

We started with a 1.25-min-long video which included text as part of the graphic (think of a movie from youtube that has credits rolling over it). We needed to erase/cover the text (without negatively impacting the movie and its sound), and then insert our own new text into the movie. The text to be inserted was actually 4 separate phrases - each to appear and then disappear timed to the sounds in the movie. So the words would appear ‘on top’ of the video as it played.

 

Using Articulate's Video Encoder, we could crop the movie to 'cut out' the existing text portions, but this made the remaining portion of the video too small with not enough space for us to insert our text.

 

We next attempted to use the 'Insert Logo' option in the menu ribbon, and this worked OK for one block of text, but not multiple: we first created a rectangle shape in Word, then filled it in, then added text, then took a picture of it (using SnagIt), then saved the picture as a .jpg. This could be added to the movie as the logo image/file, but would stay on the video for the whole duration - this is probably the point of adding a 'logo' but wasn't what we wanted.  

 

We next tried to trim the video into multiple small pieces, each with its own logo .jpg, but were not able to piece them back together as one cohesive movie file within the Encoder.

 

I happen to have Microsoft's Movie Maker on my desktop, so used that to try to combine all the individual movie pieces into a single project that could be published. But after publishing each piece as a flash file from Video Encoder and importing each flash file into Movie Maker, the sound was no longer smooth, and there were 'gaps' of silence between each piece. We were however able to make this into a single video file, but it still wasn't what we were going for.

 

We thought about separating the video portion altogether from the audio, then just adding the audio later to the Movie Maker Project (hoping it would be continuous and smooth), but couldn't figure out how to export the sound in the Video Encoder.

 

My contact at Yukon suggested we use Movie Maker instead of Encoder for all the editing. We imported the full movie, and used the Caption button to add a text box to a section of the movie. We were able to add multiple captions at the points we wanted (using start and end times), but the text boxes could not be filled in with a solid color, and there were no options for inserting rectangle shapes behind the text (though we were able to change the font, color and size of our text). What resulted was our text appeared over the top of the existing text, making all of it unreadable. (There is an option in the Movie Maker ribbon for ‘Background color’ but it appeared as grayed out for me. I tried double clicking the text box, and clicking off of the text box, but can’t get it to  become available. Is there a trick here??)

 

Next stop: we downloaded a trial version of Adobe Premiere. Though the trial version automatically inserts a watermark over the top of your edited movie, the toolset included text boxes, shapes and other options which were exactly what we needed. We ended up to be lucky when we discovered our Marketing dept has a bonafide copy of Adobe Premiere, so they were able to assist us in editing the movie and saving the project to the Adobe Premiere file format (.xvid).

 

With finished video in hand, we downloaded 'Any Video Converter' and converted the file to .AVI, which we were then able to insert into PowerPoint as part of a large presentation. The movies were a hit, but the 30 min presentation took 4 people a total of over 30 hours to figure this all out. We're the better for it next time around, but if anyone can see anything we didn't try that might have worked or saved us time, or any other suggestions, I would love to hear them!