Hardware and software

To practice making a movie with the materials found on this site you will need nothing more than a reasonably good PC (at least 512Mb RAM) installed with Windows XP service Pack 2. If you don't have SP2 then you really should install it from the http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com

In addition, if you want to make your own movie projects, then you will need a digital (not analogue) video camera, a firewire (IEEE 1394) cable and a firewire adapter in your PC or laptop (many come with this as standard). If you don't have the firewire connectivity on your video camera then you can use a USB connector but it is much slower.

Video files can be very large, typically a one minute movie takes about 15Mb of storage. The clips included in this site are a deliberate compromise between size and quality. The issue of file storage needs to be considered before using digital video on a large scale. (It maybe necessary to archive students' work rather than leave it clogging up a server). There is also the issue of network traffic to address, as moving the files around a network may also cause problems.

Due to the size of the files and the complex compression (rendering) process, the time it takes to compile a movie can be up to 30 minutes. Key factors in the time taken for rendering are processor speed, available RAM and available stotage space on the hard drive. For quality desktop video, modern PC's with large amounts of fast hard drive storage, good graphics cards and lots of memory are essential.

There are many video-editing programs available (see links page). We used Microsoft Movie Maker 2 because it comes as part of Microsoft Windows XP and is simple to use. Its main limitations are that it only allows one audio track and that you can only produce videos in the WMV format. Movie Maker 2 is much improved from the original version 1 and Windows XP users should seriously look at upgrading to the newer version.