Subtitles of the Movie

Whenever you're about to create a new composite, it's a really good idea to first think of the end user. Who is the intended audience? So that will have a lot to do with what you choose whenever you go to File, New. So we're going to talk about Duration, which is your time and the Resolution, which is located under the Format Options. Let's start with this guy first to get him out of the way. The Duration that you see here has quite a few numbers here separated by semicolons. And pretty much what you're working with is hours, which is the first block here. Then you have minutes. Then you have seconds and then you have frames. So for example, you can have ten seconds of animation and 04, four frames. Now, when you're doing film, you're going to be dealing with pretty much 24 frames per second and video is 30 frames per second. So keep that in mind when you're talking about your Duration. Normally when I show you how to use Combustion, I'll keep my Duration at ten seconds. To change this number, you can simply click like so or double click and enter a value in the calculator. Now let's talk about the Resolution. Also a pretty important thing to think about because based on the way you're going to show your film, this number here that you see, 640 by 480, which is in pixels, will be very important to you. So let's go ahead and start off with the first one: NTSC, which is the North American Standard for video in America. And it's also used in some countries in Europe and overseas and all that kind of good, fun stuff. PAL is used in Europe as well and it's a slightly different size. So based on your region or where you live, you may want to choose what's appropriate for you. We also have some other ones such as NTSC D1, which is going to give you a bigger screen size: 720 by 486. Something else that's going to be important, of course, is your Bit Depth. The higher the Bit Depth, the more colors you're going to be dealing with and the larger your file size is going to be as well; especially when you get the floating numbers, which can go on forever. Then we also have this guy right here: Pixel Aspect Ratio. You're either going to have a square pixel or an oblong pixel. Normally when you're working on something that's going to be seen on a computer, you're going to want to work with square pixels. And the best way to think about it is computers are for squares. So what you can do is choose something like NTSC, which is going to give you a Pixel Aspect Ratio of one, which is a flat, or rather a square pixel. For television, you're going to have an oblong pixel, so you're going to have this right here. And whenever you're working on other formats, such as HDTV, you're going to have an even larger output size: 1280 times 720. Now, before I continue with this list, something important to understand about working with computer files as opposed to print. When you're working with Combustion or a web design application, you're thinking about pixels, not inches; pixels. Whenever you want to print something from, let's say, Illustrator or InDesign or Photoshop and you're going to print a magazine or an ad, then you're dealing with inches. But in the computer realm, we deal with pixels. Now, when you're going to do some of those gigantic feature film theater screens, you're dealing with super-duper resolution here so make sure you have the RAM and the hard drive space to handle something like this because you're really going to be messing yourself up big time if you're going to do like a little animation of a turtle going across the street in this size, unless you're going IMAX bro, so you want to make sure that you don't, you don't go with these guys here unless you have the equipment to handle the video. Video and audio take up a large amount of space on your computer, so make sure you have a lot of RAM for processing the information as well as storage space as far as gigabytes on your hard drive. So be sure that you're ready for that kind of stuff when you're getting ready to do some film work in Combustion.