tracking shot howto

Welcome!

Hey there. Welcome to the tracking shot 'howto' guide.

This guide is where we'll let you know how to make the most interesting movies out of your photos. The entire process should be fun and easy. We'll walk you through it below. If you're confused by something on the site though, then it's probably something other people are confused about too. Don't blame yourself! Just let us know what's happening (or not happening) and we'll do our best to make it better. Also, if you have any questions that you don't see answered here or even if you just want a little more explanation on some of the finer points, contact us! You can send us an email at support@trackingshot.com.

If you'd like to read a bit more about the tracking shot team and see some of our influences, please visit our tracking shot remix blog.

Making Your First Movie

So the idea here is that making movies out of your photos should be really simple. We've made tracking shot to help you create videos that you will want to share with your friends and family. Essentially all you have to do is click upload and then select the photos and music that you want to use. We'll do the rest by putting the files on our site and making a first cut of your movie automatically. The second step is just watching the movie! If you like it, then you're done. Enjoy.

Perhaps the movie is not quite right though. Could be that you want us to try making the movie again or maybe you just want to see what the other possibilities are. Well if you're willing to let go of the current movie, meaning you won't be able to go back to it, then all you have to do is hit the remix button above the movie. We'll build you a new movie. You can remix as many times as you want, but when you have a movie you like, keep it!

Of course, you may have something more specific in mind. Maybe you'd like a certain photo to start the movie and a different one to close. Perhaps there's a photo that you want to stay on screen a bit longer. And there's probably something that you want to zoom in on right? Well if you click on any of the photos on the left side of the screen, you'll get a window that let's you make some choices for how the photo should be displayed in the movie. If you would like a detailed walk-through of your options, read the article below called 'Give Us a Clue'. It's about tweaking your movie by adding hints on specific photos...

Privacy

The movies you create on tracking shot right now have limited privacy. They are not available to view by anyone else on the web but yourself until you choose to make them public as described below in the article Share!. However, as we try to continually improve the quality of your movies, the tracking shot team reserves the right to look at everything that you upload to us. Beyond that though, we will not sell or share any of your content (or your email address) with anyone without your direct approval. We're thankful that you're here and we'll try not to alienate you.

Uploading

Whether you use a Mac or a Windows machine, the process for uploading your photos, video and music is pretty much the same:

We recommend that you make a new folder on your desktop. This is where you can copy all the photo, video and music files that you want to upload. It's a lot easier to put everything in one place so they're easy to find. Maybe name it "tracking shot upload" or whatever name you might want to use for your movie. You'll be uploading your photos and your music at the same time, so just toss it all in there.

• For your photos, we currently support JPEG, PNG and GIF file types.
• For your video clips, we currently suport M4V, MP4, MPG, MOV, AVI, WMV, FLV files. However, some of those file types can use codecs that we don't support yet... but we've covered the most common ones, just beware of that before uploading a large clip (>10MB is large). You must edit your clips before uploading as we don't offer any video editing tools on the site. We recommend that your clips not exceed 1 minute in length for the best results.
• For your music we currently support MP3 and WAV audio files. You can check the format of a file by highlighting it and then COMMAND-I (Mac) or ALT-ENTER (Windows). Everything else will have to be converted, a process that will be described in a later post.

Remember that the larger your files, the longer the upload will take! Keep this in mind especially with your video clips. We do have a size limit of 50MB per file as well.

Your photos could be in a few different places on your computer. The default location on a Mac is a folder called Pictures in your home directory. The default location on a Windows machine is called My Pictures. You will want to copy the image files to the folder that you made on the desktop as you find them. Make sure you're not moving the files because you don't want to misplace anything important. To copy a file on a Mac, hold the OPTION key down while dragging and you'll see a plus sign in a green bubble appear under your cursor arrow, so that when you drop it in the folder on the desktop the original is left untouched. On a Windows machine, you'll want to hold down the CTRL key while you drag so that a plus sign in a box appears on the file, that way when you drop the file in your target folder a new copy of the file is created.

Your music should be in iTunes whether you're on a Mac or a PC. I'm only half-kidding... The nice thing about using iTunes is that you can just drag and drop a song from any playlist into the folder that you created on your desktop and it will make a copy there. But remember that we're only supporting MP3 and WAV audio files right now. Most importantly, this means we cannot use your songs purchased from the iTunes music store because they are stored in a proprietary format. This is unfortunate, but Apple and the record companies have created this restriction. If you find this frustrating, we recommend that you take a look at the website of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and consider supporting their efforts to restore rights to the media consumer. However, if you're willing to spend some time and use up a CDR, you can burn an audio CD from your purchased iTunes music and then rip it back into iTunes as MP3 files.

If you don't use iTunes, then perhaps your music files might live in the Music (Mac) or My Music (Windows) folders. Find the song you want and copy it to the folder you made on the desktop. If you're still rocking it 90's style with CDs, we respect that, but you'll have to rip some songs using iTunes. We'll walk you through that in a later article.

Is everything you want in the folder that you created on the desktop now? Then you're ready to upload. At the tracking shot site, login or choose free trial (note that movies created in a free trial account will not be saved). On the left, under Photos & Music, click the upload button. A dialogue window will appear that will let you find your folder of photos and music. Click on Desktop, then open the folder you made. Inside that folder will be the photos and music that you copied there. Now you want to select all of files. To do that quickly, click once on the first file in the list to highlight it, then hold down the shift key, scroll to the last file and click it once. All the files in that folder should now be highlighted. Then, on a Mac you'll click Select while on Windows you'll click Open. After you do that a window should appear in your browser that shows the progress as each file is uploaded to tracking shot. Isn't this amazing? Your movie will be automatically generated as the photos are uploaded. Enjoy the payoff from your hard work!

Give Us A Clue

Now that your movie has been created and you've watched it a few times. You might want to make a few changes. We try to make the best movies possible with the least input, but we can do even more if you give us a few hints about what you would like to see.

If you click on any of the photos in the left column on your tracking shot account, you'll get a preview window. Inside that window you can add some information that will help us use your photos in more interesting shots.

The "important photo" box, when checked, will encourage the photo to linger on screen longer and to be used in the climax of a shot. A yellow star will be added to the thumbnail icon of the photo.

If you want a photo to be used in the opening or closing of your movie, then all you have to do is drag (click and hold the mouse button on the photo, move the mouse with the mouse button still pressed, then let go when you have it where you want) that photo to be the first, or last, photo.

When you want to see a close up or a zoom in of a small portion of the picture, then you can drag your cursor over the image and make a box that encloses the interesting area. A check will automatically appear next to "use interesting area".

Once you've made all your changes, click "remix video" above the video player window. After a few moments, we'll generate a new movie for you that uses your suggestions. As you can see, there are a lot more dynamic shots that we can create with your photos when we have just a few bits of advice from you.

Oh. One more thing... Want to make a new movie? Just click the new (+) button on the right at the top of the Movies column.

Find Free Content!

Can't find the right song in your mp3 or CD collection? No worries. There is plenty of free content out there that is legal for you to download. This list is our ongoing effort to find you the best free music on the web.

One of the best resources for free music downloads is Amazon. Just check out the huge collection of free music downloads that they have. They're all mp3 files and they're completely searchable. Try entering "surf" in the search field...

A great new place to look is ccMixter.org where you can find lots of electronic and remixed music available for download and reuse under creative commons licences.

Share!

Once you have a movie that you like, you might want to share it with some people.

To make a movie public, you must create an account with trackingshot first. It's pretty easy to register, click on the "get started" button on the top right of the page. Enter your email address and choose a password. Submit and you're done!

Now to share a movie, you have to enable public viewing for each movie that you want to show to other people. To do this, click on the movie thumbnail on the right side of your trackingshot account, then check the box that says "allow public viewing". After that, the movie will be viewable at the following link:

http://trackingshot.com/public/yoursharingname

Just sub in your sharing name!

For an example of what a public share page will look like, check out mine here:

http://trackingshot.com/public/kurt.zero

Ripping CDs with iTunes

It's time to learn how to rip audio files onto your computer. If you don't have it already (chances are you do), go download iTunes from the Apple website and install it.

Now launch iTunes and stick a CD in your computer. Before you pull the audio files off the CD, you have to make sure that iTunes is set up to create audio files in a format that we can use. Open the iTunes drop down menu and click on Preferences. Then select Advanced and then Importing. Set the Import Using menu to MP3 Encoder and then choose the quality you want under Setting (I think 192kbps is best). Now you're ready to make digital audio files that you can use for your movies. Your CD should show up in the source list on the left, just click on it and then click on the Import button on the top right of the iTunes window. Watch in awe as the MP3 files are generated. You'll find the files have been moved to the Library under the Source list on the left.

Now just copy the song you want by dragging it to the folder on your desktop.

Pace Control

Above the movie is a pace slider that lets you change the speed and style of the movie.

While we always try to match the transitions between photos to the music that you upload, you can set the average pace of each shot by moving the slider left or right: left is slower and right is faster.

Additionally, there are three sections in the pace slider. Each section creates a distinct style of movie to match the overall pace of the movie. So you'll find that if you set the pace slider anywhere in the first section on the left, that the style is less intense and the movie will linger on each image a little longer. The middle section of the pace slider will create movies with a wide range of shot styles at a medium pace. And finally the right section makes the fastest and most intense movies, which is definitely best for music videos.

After you set the pace slider to the section that you want and the desired speed in that section, hit the remix button to create the new movie.

Photo Ordering

By default we try to make the best movie we can by mixing up the photos and matching them to the music with the most interesting shots. While this can be great for some sets of photos it can be frustrating and confusing for others. Which led to the number one request from our first group of users: let us set the order of the photos!

We totally understand. There are going to be photos that just need to be seen in the correct order: a baseball game, a wedding, a birthday party. Well now you can turn on strict photo ordering by clicking inside the circle with a dash on the top left of any photo. You'll see that the dash disappears and now every photo has a number.

The photos start out in the order that you uploaded them, but you can drag photos into a different order. Click and hold on a photo and then drag it to the right place. As you drag the photo, it will move into place and push the others ahead of it. When you have the photo where you want it, release the mouse button. Make sure that the numbers are showing at the top left of each photo that you want to appear in order. If you see dashes, click once on one of them to turn on strict ordering.