Producing a Video In Power Director

In this tutorial we’re going to produce a video that you can either upload to You Tube or other video sharing sites or make ready to insert in your own website.

If you’re going to upload it to You Tube or other video sharing websites then after you produce it in Power Director it’s going to be ready for immediate upload and Power Director gives you this option straight from their interface.

The final video after production is going to be a .mov file which is a common file format for upload to major video sharing sites.

Such sites already have their own inbuilt skins, meaning the controls such as volume, play pause etc so you don’t need to worry about having to add these yourself.

If you’re wanting to insert the video into a webpage, then you’re going to have to add your own skin before uploading. On how to add skins to videos please watch the next video about further producing your video in Flash as this will give you a step by step guide how to do it easily and quickly.

Ok, now just to break things up a bit I’m going to use a video on fireworks which is a bit of a change from the videos we’ve used in the examples to date.

So here we are in Power Director with a video I’ve made from a bunch of different clips from our city’s annual fireworks.

As you can see, I’ve laid down an audio track with some natural sounds of the fireworks exploding overhead.

When I’m satisfied with the final product it’s time to produce the video.

So the first thing we do is go up to the top of the page and click on the “Produce” tab.

Next, we’re presented with some choices on the type of file we want to produce the movie in. For this example I want to produce the movie in a .MOV format, so I click on the .MOV tab.

You’ll notice a You Tube tab and Facebook tab in the choices so you can upload your finished video straight to these sites if you wish.

Next, we want to select where we want the final produced video to be saved, so we go down and click on the tab to the right of the “output folder” text box and navigate to the folder where we want the produced video to be saved and name our video, which I’ll aptly name “fireworks”. As you can see Power Director automatically adds the .MOV suffix.

Then hit the Start button and production will begin.

After the video has been produced, the .mov video will automatically appear in the media room where you can click on it, then click play, and it will play in the screen.

Here you can check it to make sure no bugs have occurred during processing including volume.

Now as far as producing a video goes that’s about it and we could end this tutorial here but for the point of further producing your video in Flash, which is explained in greater detail in the following tutorial we’ll keep going with this video to show you in real time just how quickly it is to produce a video in Flash, then imbed it into a webpage and upload it to the server.

So back at my desktop, click on the Flash icon and open up Flash. Then click on the Flash File (action script 3.0) tab under create new.

Then click on file and scroll down to “import” then across to “import to stage”.

Then navigate to the drive, folder and .mov file that we want to process. In this case we’re after fireworks.mov.

Click on this file. Click “next” if the file path is correct.

Leave the deployment at “progressive download from a web server” and click ok.

With encoding and a file size that is not too large we can set the video at “custom” and data rate at anywhere from 1500 to 2000 kilobits per second.
Set the audio at the highest level of 256 kbps.

Next we decide on what skin we want to use and the color. Then click next.

If everything’s ok in the “finish video import” screen click “finish”.

Finally we navigate to where we want to save our Flash .fla video and name it.

Click save and Flash will start encoding the video.

Once Flash has finsihe encoding the video we can then test it by clicking on “control”, then scroll down and click on test video.

If all’s well with the video, click on save and we’re done.

Next, to embed our video in a webpage we open up Dreamweaver. Then navigate to the folder where our Flash video files are saved. Flash produces and dissects the final video into three components. A .fla file a .swf file and a .flv

Then we need to open up an existing html or php page in Dreamweaver, or create a new page.

In this example we’ll just open up an existing page and change it accordingly.

First, we’ll change the heading, font, size and color.  Then save the page with a new name. And change the page title and meta tags to reflect the content of the new page.

Then delete the old video in the page and insert the new one. We do this by simply clicking on the .swf file and drag it to where we want it displayed in the page.

Centre it and then test it by clicking on it then click “play”. If all’s well the video should play and the skin functionality should all work.

Save again. The new page that we’ve just created should also appear in the menu folder as a .html or php depending on what format you saved the page.

All that’s left now is to upload the essential files to the server. And they are the  webpage i.e. in this case the .html page, the .flv file, the .swf file and the skin (if it isn’t already on the server). We DON’T need to upload the .fla file to the server.

Click on the blue arrow which “puts” files on the server.

Once the upload has finished we go into google, type in the page name and if everything has uploaded successfully our webpage with our new video should be displayed for the world to see.

And there it is. All functioning perfectly with the page title and meta tags also displayed correctly.