This project takes still images from various sources including photos, drawn animation, stop frame animation, and puts them together make a movie.

The basic idea is to turn this:

into this:

The big problem is how to assemble them to make the video?

The obvious answer is to make use of the Windows Media Format SDK but at the moment this is difficult to work with in any language other than C++. At some point in the future no doubt Microsoft will get round to creating a “managed” interface for it and it will be possible to use it from all the .NET languages but I doubt it will be any time soon.

Meanwhile there is a good alternative in the form of Video for Windows (VfW). This is the original video system introduced for Windows 98. While it has been largely over taken by Windows Media it is still supported and if all you want to do is create an AVI file it’s perfectly adequate and has the advantage of being available on older machines.

There are some problems with using VfW, the first being its terrible documentation. You can read about VfW at:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms713492(VS.85).aspx

or just search for “Video for Windows” on the Microsoft web site.

The second problem is that you have to make use of API function calls and this means discovering how to transfer data from whatever high-level language you are using to the API s’ primitive data types.

We are going to use C# (download the free C# Express development system) but as the project is mostly API calls you can use any .NET language that supports P/invoke.

<ASIN:0321552962>

<ASIN:3827268621@DE>

<ASIN:0672325691>