Nikon Software
George Cairns combines stills and video clips using Nikon ViewNX-Movie Editor
Combine stills and video clips shot on your Nikon into a simple, YouTubeready movie, complete with transitions and captions. It’s really easy using Nikon’s free ViewNX-Movie Maker software
Most Nikon cameras now offer you the ability to capture HD-quality video footage
as well as photos. As a result, video footage is becoming a popular way of sharing experiences on social networking sites. Indeed, when you scroll through your Facebook newsfeed a friend’s video clip will start playing automatically, regardless of whether you want to watch it or not! Eye-catching video clips help your content stand out from other people’s stills.
To reflect the fact that some photographers enjoy shooting and sharing video, Nikon’s free ViewNX-i app provides ways to help you manage and export your footage. You can play your clips directly from within ViewNX-i’s interface or export frames of video as JPEG-quality stills to display online (or act as custom thumbnails if you share your clip on sites such as YouTube).
ViewNX-i also acts as a launchpad for Nikon’s ViewNX-Movie Editor. This additional app enables you to export your HD movies in a smaller, email-compatible format. It can also combine several clips into a single movie file. More usefully, ViewNXMovie Editor enables you to trim clips so that you only share the interesting bits. You can also combine multiple clips in an edited sequence – to share holiday highlights, for example. Thanks to post-production tools you can ‘ice the cake’ by adding music, titles and transitions to your edited sequence of clips. ViewNX-Movie Editor even enables you to combine stills from your holiday with video clips, and adds rostrum-camera-style tilting moves to the stills to make them look more dynamic.
ViewNX-Movie Editor is basic, with a relatively small selection of transitions. Nonetheless it does provide a free, quick way of creating short, slick video sequences that are perfect for uploading to Facebook or YouTube, as we’ll show you.