Movie Studio for Zune® 1.0 Manual

 

 

This software allows you to put home movies, DVD's, downloaded content and TV on your Zune® in two clicks.

You can watch them in fullscreen landscape mode. What you need is:

- PC with Windows XP. For DVD support you'll also need a built-in DVD-player.

- 4 Gigabyte of free space on a harddisk (for a 100 minute movie) to store temporary files

- A Zune device

Installation

- Make sure you have Windows Media Player 9 or 10 installed on your system.

- Make sure your system has a software DVD player (such as PowerDVD or WinDVD), if you want to convert DVD content.

- Make sure you have a harddisk with at least 4 Gigabytes of free space. By default the software will look for the C:\ drive as the temporary drive. You can change this in DVD Settings Menu \ Temp Drive.

- Install the PC software by launching the red installer, it will auto-install the software and place shortcuts on the desktop and Windows Start Menu.

- Install the Zune PC software. When you set it up, make sure that Videos are Synced automatically (picture below).

Quick Guide

[1] Source Drive . Click the drive you want to open. This can be a hard disk, CD-Rom, DVD-R(w), DVD-Video, removable drive, flash drive or anything else. Press Open to start. Choose DVD Content for any video that comes from a normal, factory produced DVD disc. Choose Video Content if the content is a video file stored on the hard drive, or if your content is a Video-CD, S-VCD or DVD recordable/rewritable that can not be converted as a regular DVD.

The content you picked will start playing in the Preview Window. You can right-click in the window for more preview options. Such as a fullscreen preview.

DVD's can contain multiple titles, such as (home) movies, trailers, etc. By default, the software will pick the largest title. Usually this is the main movie. You can change this in Advanced options.

[2] Action / Advanced You can start immediately by pressing the Action button. The file or dvd conversion will begin right away. If you need control over the picture quality, language settings etcetera, you click the Advanced button.

Click on Action and the PC will start converting. The preview video will stop playing to save processor cycles . Conversion takes one step with content coming from harddisk or CD. But coming from DVD, it takes three steps. DVDs are first captured to harddisk using Cyberspeed technology. During Step1, the video and audio from the DVD will be saved to a temporary file, this may take between 10 minutes and 1 hour, depending on the speed of your PC and the speed of your DVD drive. If you have a relatively fast PC and DVD drive, you may see speeds of up to fifteen times realtime. In that case a 90 minute DVD will be captured in 6 minutes. After Step 1, Step 2 will start automatically. This step compresses the file further. This will take approximately 2 times realtime on a 2Ghz PC. So 45 minutes for a 90 minute movie. In Step3, the final Zune® movie file will be made. This takes usually less than a minute. On average, you may expect to transfer a complete DVD to your Zune® in less then an hour.

[3] Source Size You need to tell the software what size the source content is, so that it can calculate the optimal playback size on your Zune®.

Most DVD's have a 16:9 aspect ratio (widescreen) and most TV shows have a 4:3 dimension. For feature films shot in Academy Standard 16:9, the widescreen-setting is automatically chosen. In case your DVD was shot in Cinemascope , you need to pick the Cinemascope (2.35:1 aspect ratio) setting. This will correct the 'egghead' effect that you may see. When finished press Next.

 

 

 

 

[5] Zoom Level . Choose the zoom level. Then press Next.

If you prefer to see the whole movie in widescreen, choose 'Show All'. This will give you the whole picture, but it will show black bars on the Zune®. The reason is that film sizes (so called aspect ratio's) and the size of your Zune® screen are different. You will notice that the shots are missing abit from the left and right side. If you choose 'Zoom In', the software will chop the black bars off and blow-up the picture.

 

[6] Encoding Quality. Choose the encoding quality or target size. Then press Next.

If you prefer a better video quality, drag the video quality slider to the right. This will give improved video quality, but bigger filesize. You will see the filesize change in the textbox above. This is the size of the final movie after conversion. If you drag the video slider to the left, you will able to fit more minutes on a memorycard, but this will result in more blockiness in the video. The sound, if set to maximum, will be CD quality, on average it will be FM-radio like.

[7] Episodes, Language and Subtitles.

Next, you will see the episodes and language settings, the Episode , Audio Dub and Subtitle options appear.

A) Episode Menu. If your source material is a DVD, you have the option to select an alternative title from the disc. For example a 'behind the scenes'-documentary, or another episode from a DVD containing several tv-shows. The longest video on the disc will be shown by default, usually that's the main movie.

B) Audio Dub Menu. This allows you to set a foreign audiotrack. For example if you want to watch a movie in Spanish, you would pick that language and override the default English setting.

C) Subtitles Menu. If you choose subtitles, you will see a droplist of possible languages on the disc. Important: subtitles need to be rendered in the videofile, this will slow down conversion. Generally, choosing subtitles will mean the DVD conversion will be 3 times slower then normal.

[8] Action. You press Action and the PC will start converting. The preview video will stop playing to save processor cycles . Conversion takes one step with content coming from harddisk or CD. But coming from DVD, it takes two steps. DVD's are now captured using Cyberspeed technology. During Step1, the video and audio from the DVD will be saved to a temporary file, this may take between 10 minutes and 1 hour, depending on the speed of your PC and the speed of your DVD drive. If you have a relatively fast PC and DVD drive, you may see speeds of up to fifteen times realtime. In that case a 90 minute DVD will be captured in 6 minutes. After Step 1, Step 2 will start automatically. This step compresses the file further to the final Zune® movie file. This will take approximately 3 times realtime on a 3Ghz PC. So 30 minutes for a 90 minute movie. On average, you may expect to transfer a DVD to your Zune® in 45 minutes.

[9] Transfer

When conversion is finished, a video file will be in the Shared Video folder (Warning: this is not the same as the My Video folder). The path of the Shared Video folder may vary per PC, language and user, but mostly looks like this: C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Documents\My Videos. In Windows Explorer, you can also click on Shared Documents, then Shared Video to find it.

After conversion, Movie Studio for Zune will auto-start the Zune PC Software (make sure it's installed)

You press the Video Tab to see the converted video in the library and recently added video.

Connect your Zune device with the provided USB cable and press the Sync button in the Zune PC Software and then Start Sync to perform a video transfer to the Zune device.

You cannot copy a video manually to the device, it always has to go through the Zune PC software.

[10] Play the video with the built-in Video Player on the Zune®.

On your Zune® , scroll down in the Main Menu and choose Video. Then scroll through the playlist and select the video you would like to see.

The volume can be adjusted with the up and down buttons.

Menu Options

[1] DVD Settings \Temp Drive You set the disk drive that you would like to store temporary files on. Choose the biggest available harddrive that you have. Temporary files may take up to 4 Gigabytes space that need to be stored on this drive. They will be cleaned up after conversion.

[2] DVD Settings \Special\Cyberspeed Leave this option ON by default. If you turn this OFF, your DVD conversions may take 5 times longer. Only if you experience problems opening or converting DVD's, you can try turning this option off.

[3] Download \Video This option allows you to download video from Youtube® or Altavista®. The downloaded content may then be converted to your Zune®

If you encounter problems with the software, please consult the Tech Database : http://www.makayama.com/zune100engfaq.html for common questions and solutions.

updated: 5-Jan-2007