Converting AVI movie files for use with Tango Movie Tool

Overview:

The Tango Movie Tool (TMT) was designed to be used with the movie recording feature of digital still cameras -- like the Olympus C-3040 (which directly produces 320x240 .mov files at 15 frames/second) and the Fuji FinePix F-700 (which directly produces 320x240 .avi files at 30 frames/second). Before using TMT to annotate or view a movie, the .mov or .avi file must be converted into an "image sequence" -- a sequence of numbered files, each containing a JPEG image for a single frame.

For AVI files, this conversion is done using a program called VideoMach which can be purchased for about $19 from http://www.gromada.com. You will also need a special "Motion-JPEG (MJPEG)" video CODEC, which can be purchased for about $20 from http://www.morgan-multimedia.com. Both programs can be downloaded on a free evaluation basis.

The VideoMach program is particularly useful for TMT purposes, since you can trim the video file, color correct it, and adjust its contrast and brightness, all as part of the process of generating the output JPEG image sequence.

The following instructions apply to converting an AVI movie file into an image sequence of .jpg files which can be annotated and viewed with the Tango Movie Tool. If you have an MOV file, use these instructions instead.

If you took your original movies using a mini-DV or analog camcorder (rather than the movie feature of a digital still camera), you will need to download your movie onto your hard disk in either the MOV or AVI format. Many programs are available for this purpose. For example, the Windows Movie Maker program that comes free with Windows/XP will download a movie from a mini-DV digital camcorder (via the Firewire interface), and save it to your hard disk in the "DV-AVI" format -- an AVI file that preserves the high-resolution of the original recording.

The detailed steps assume that you have installed the VideoMach program and the MJPEG codec according to the default installation instructions that came with these programs. For reference, the MJPEG CODEC configuration dialog is shown here:

Detailed Steps:

1. Start the VideoMach program, and open the AVI file that you want to convert. At this point, the screen will look something like the following. You can right-click in the "input video list" window, as shown, or use the File/Open menu.

2. After the AVI file is open, you will probably want to trim it down to the specific frames of interest before generating the output image sequence. You can right-click on the name of the file that you just opened, as shown, or you can use the File / In-Out Points menu.

3. Review the movie using the left/right arrows to move through the file frame-by-frame, and select the in-out points in the dialog, as shown below:

4. Define the ouput file parameters by selecting Define Output on the File menu:

5. First, set the options on the Files Tab of the Define Output dialog:

• The Output Mode should be Video and Audio or Video Only (no audio can be output to an image sequence).
• For the Format, select "JPEG, Joint Photographic Experts Group."
• Then select the output file location and name, by clicking the "..." button. This will display the "Select Output File" dialog, described in the next step.

6. In the Select Output File dialog, you should first browse to the folder where you are storing your annotated movie image sequences, and then create a new, empty folder to hold the image sequence that you are about to generate (in this example, we have created the "SampleSequence" folder.

• Be sure that the "Save as type" entry shows: JPEG, Joint Photographic Experts Group.
• Enter a "template" for the file names, consisting of a simple, alphabetic name, followed by 1 space, followed by "001", followed by ".jpg" as shown in this example. (The use of "001" implies that the frames will be numbered from "001" up to a maximum of "999". If you have more than 999 frames, use "0001"; if you have less than 100 frames, you can use "01".)
• Click Save on the "Select Output File" dialog. Do not click on OK on the "Define Output" dialog; instead, click on the Video Tab.

7. The Video Tab of the Define Output dialog offers you the option of cropping and/or resizing the frames before they are ouput. Normally, the 320x240 size of the input movie matches the required 320x240 size of the image sequence JPEG frames.

However, if you are converting from a mini-DV camcorder movie, the input file will be 720x480. In this special case, first use the Crop button to specify that 40 pixels be cropped from the left and the right of each frame (yielding a remaining width of 640 pixels). Then, use the Resize button to reduce the size of the cropped frames to 50%.

For the usual case, you only need to check and set the "Frame Rate" and the "Format:"

• If the automatic frame rate appears to match the frame rate of your camera, leave the Automatic box checked. Otherwise, uncheck it, and enter the actual frame rate for your original movie.
• The Format area should show "JPEG quality: 85%. If it does not, perform the Step #8. When it is properly set, you can click on the OK button of the Define Ouput dialog, to take you back to the main program screen.

8. If the JPEG quality setting is not already shown as 85%, click the Format Options button and use the slider in the resulting dialog to set the quality to 85. Click OK to return to the Video Tab of the Define Output dialog.

9. Before generating the output image sequence, you can also use the Video Effect menu to specify adjustments to be made to each frame as it is output. In the following example, we have brightened the mid-tones by using the Gamma Correction, and we have specified a color adjustment to compensate for the incandescent lighting of the dance floor.

10. Select the File / Start Processing menu item to generate the image sequence.

11. After generating the output image sequence, you can exit from the VideoMach program, bring up the Tango Movie Tool program, and view/annotate the movie image sequence.