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Software Tips

Create Moving Video Overlays in AVI Tricks

Ever wanted to have a superimposed image move across the screen in a video? Well, with this tutorial I'll show you exactly how to make partially transparent images move smoothly across frames of a video!

The first step is to download, install, and run AVI Tricks, a freeware program from Bobyte Software that allows you to edit and enhance AVI video files. Once the program is opened, it's time to import some footage. Go to Edit > Add Video to add a new video clip to your composition. From the "Add an object" dialog box, select "Video" from the list of available objects to add. Then, click "Set",browse through the file explorer and open an .avi video file. Note that AVI Tricks does NOT support any file types other than .avi, so it's important to convert/save your video files to this format before continuing.

Next, after we've imported our first video, we're going to trim it down. Clips taken directly from a digital camera or other such video capture device often need to be edited first. I've imported a clip from my trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Mark-In and Mark-Out Points

Here we go first with some basic video editing. On the bottom timeline panel should be a bar with name of our imported movie. Now, right-click on a specific point of the bar. From here, we can set this point as the start point of our movie by selecting Mark-In and Mark-Out > Set as Mark-In Point on the right-click menu. Pretty simple, eh? Keep on reading, I'll show you more.
Do the same type of thing to create a mark-out point for your movie. Now we have trimmed the length of our movie clip, it's time to add the overlay effects.

To add an overlay effect, we're going to need a few things: An overlay image (duh), an object for the overlay image, and a motion path for the object, consisting of what are called "nodes". An overlay image can be in .bmp, .jpeg, or .gif format. You first have to import the overlay image into AVI Tricks, and onto the video layer you're working on. To the left is the overlay image I'm going to use, except first I'll seperate the two halves and make their backgrounds transparent.

To import a transparent overlay, right click on the movie's bar, and select "Add Effect" from the list. Then expand the "Overlays" group, and select "Transparent Image Overlay" from the list of available overlays. Load the image as we did with the video. The new overlay will be inserted as a "effect layer" of the video you imported.
Next, select the new bar of the overlay object and click the "Rubber Band Mode" button, located in the upper left-hand corner of the timeline box.
This next part is probably the most difficult. Move the movie position slider (along the top of the timeline box) until you reach a point where you want to add a "node". Click the blue add button to add a node to the selected point of the video. Then, you can move the nodes around by clicking and dragging in the video pane. You can add and move around as many nodes as you like. The more nodes, the more complex the motion of your object.

Don't forget to save your work! Go to File > Save Project and the project file will be saved. Note that if you move the locations of the source files afterward, you will have to redirect AVI Tricks to where those files were moved to, upon next opening of the project file.

The final step is to export your newly-enhanced video. Go to File > Export as Video and save as an AVI. Set the video codec, size, and frame rate to whichever you please. I personally recommend exporting at NTSC frame rate, 320x240 pixel dimensions, and Cinepak Codec.

Check out how my video turned out! I hope yours turned out just as well.

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