Rough Draft Pinnacle Movie

[remmies]

  ahh, i'm not even sure if this has it, but the pinnacle movie editing program, I need to add a mask over my video to give it a widescreen looking effect, does anyone knwo how to do this? If not pinnacle studios, what program can i do it in?

Ok, i found out how to do that^ now i need to know how to rip audio from movies, i have a capture card, so for example i have "shrek" and i want to take the sound bit of shrek "get away donkey" how do i do this? is it possible with pinnancle, or windows movie maker?
p.s. here is a rough draft of our video
http://www.putfile.com/media.php?n=halo-hobo-wmp
the final version will be the same, but pure digital(this was converted), for a higer resolution(very high), and will have more footage in it, but this is our practice vid.

[Hobbes]

If your movie is shot in traditional 4:3 aspect ratio, Pinnacle Studio offers very little.

You can, in the menu bars above, set the ratio to 16:9 but this will give you a very squashed display.

A workaround is to add a permanent Title-track to the movie. This title track has to be as long as the movie and consist of two black boxes hand-drawn to the top- and bottomside of the movie.

This is, as far as I'm aware, the only Pinnacle-solution. And being an Avid Pinnacle user (pardon the pun), I'm also quite sure it's the only Pinnacle-solution.

Hope this helps!

[LGM]

Well, if Pinnacle supports alpha transparency, then you can make aTGA file that is 720x480, but make the middle 720x360 area transparent.. Or better yet, just download it here:

http://www.lilgryphmaster.com/download/letterbox.zip

If Pinnacle supports multiple video tracks, put this one on top and it might just work.

But beware that, if you didn't componsate for letterbox when you filmed, you may be cutting some heads off. You can fix that in Premiere, but I dunno about Pinnacle.

Secondly, if you wanted a new video editor, premiere is pretty damn nice but hard to learn unless you know what you're doing.

[remmies]

Actually its a halo, video and the point is to cut off some things, but anywyas, thanks for the help i will go try these solutions and if i need anymore help i will post again

[m0ds]

A simple way is to make a BMP or GIF with two black bars at the top and bottom (about 20 pixels each). In Adobe Premiere you would then import that into a track which you can use transparency with, make the white transparent and you're left with a cropped image throughout - which looks like widescreen.

If you actually want to render to widescreen, I suggest exporting to a size of about 452x256 (or if you can handle it 912x390. You shouldn't need to put any bars in if you do that.

AS for AUDIO why not just open your volume controls, select recording controls, select "Wave out" or similar and then open Sound Recorder or Goldwave and capture the sound clip that way?

[remmies]

Thank You, that audio will come in handy for the next episodes. Also i posted the video that i needed this info on to make, read the above post o learn a little more