Jahshaka Tutorial - Basic Editing

Editing clips is the bread and butter of all movie creation, so starting with that in Jahshaka seems to fit. One can realistically work with many video, sound, and picture formats in Jahshaka, but only a few work solidly with it. This means we need to create what's called a content pipeline.

Content Pipeline

A pipeline is essentially a protocol where only certain kinds of content are created and used during production. This greatly helps in stability, since you know everything will work as planned because everything's the same. Usually, one would go through trial and error with videos of different formats and run it through all of the different effects inside the program to see if the video format is stable enough, but since you most likely don't want to do that, I'll suggest mpegs for the videos, png's for the pictures, and wav's for the sounds. Mpegs work on everything inside Jahshaka, png's have good alpha support, and wav's just sound good.

"But, the videos I have aren't mpegs," you might say. Well, there is a free utility out there called Any Video Converter that handles all of that for you. Just throw in any video you have, tell the program to convert the video to the desired mpeg format, and then run it. Easy!

The program is pretty self-explanatory, but I had a hard time trying to find the Profile button, which I'll show you to save the hassle. It's highlighted in red.

Okay, Now Can We Play with Jahshaka?

Yes, we can. You know what we got to do. Start it up!

This here's what you should see first. All nice and clean. If you don't see the media player on your left, but instead the great gaping darkness similar to the right side, then take your cursor, position it all the way to the left side of the program, and then click and drag out, revealing the panel with the player. It's kind-of a nifty way to hide and show your important gadgets. The program is organized into many different "tabs," the major ones being Desktop, Animation, Effects, Editing, Paint, and Text CG, along with their sub-tabs, all located on the bottom left-hand corner. The tabs we will be working with in this tutorial are the Desktop and the Editing tabs.

Make sure that the Desktop tab is selected, then go ahead and load a movie or picture into the program using the silvery Load button. Pick the file, open it, and then you should see your file in the dark void (let's just call this the desktop). Anytime you load a file, you are only creating a reference to the original media, not a new copy, which is incredibly awesome for saving space. But, make sure you don't delete or move the original file or else the reference will be lost.

Anyway, I have a video here of my hand making strange motions trying to conjure up an energy beam, which later I will show you how to create. When you click on your video, the preview buttons pop down, which you can play with at your heart's delight, along with a thin green rectangular slider that you can drag from left to right to move the preview to different frames. You can also move the video anywhere on the desktop to suit your organizational tastes, whether that is the "controlled chaos" approach where you have clumps of media in separate piles, or the "righty tighty" tradition where all of the media is organized alphabetically with perfect spacing. To get the latter option, click on the "Tidy" button to the left of the silvery buttons below the desktop.

Okay, enough chit-chat. Let's get to editing!

Actual Editing

Click on the Editing tab. You should see something like up above. You have your typical timeline on the bottom, the media on your left, and the, uhh..., editing monitor on the right. To start, drag your video from the player to the track on your timeline. The video should pop up on your editing monitor. Either drag the white arrow or the red around to see it work. For this next section we are going to concentrate solely on the timeline part, which is where most of the editing action happens.

Notice the green numbers beside the labels In and Out. By directly clicking and dragging on it from left to right, you can set the time for the respective marker for the selected video. You don't need to deal with the red numbers so much because it just tells you how long the movie clip is, unless you desperately need something to go for 2 seconds exactly, although for some reason you can't edit it directly anyway. This is the same procedure you follow with sounds and pictures.

Now you have this sweet soundtrack you want to throw in the background, but you feel limited because of the one track. Now you need to add another one. Click on the Tracks... button in the upper-left, and click on Append if you want the new track to be behind the currently selected track or Insert to put it in front. Realize that from that same menu is where you can move tracks up and down and delete them.

Get your virtual knives ready because now we're splittin' clips. To do that, select the clip, move the white marker to the desired position, then press the "S" key. To undo, just press Ctrl Z. To delete a clip, press the Delete key.

Once you have the video the way you want, you need to render it. Jahshaka people call it the Render button, but so many people get frustrated (like me) on finding it because there is no button that says Render. I'll show you what they mean by the Render button highlighted in yellow.

Watch your edited video, and enjoy!