Even a short piece of video can add to the effect of your story. In "A Recipe," coupling the final line, "you've made yourself a Massimo," with his video image makes him complete, animated, like Pinocchio becoming a real boy.

Unfortunately, not all digital stories can include video. Some digital storytellers don't have computers with compatible plugs for a VCR or camcorder. Some computers don't have the necessary hardware or software to capture video. Digital video takes up lots of disk space that some digital storytellers can't spare. You may fall into one of these categories, but your finished movie need not look static. Elsewhere on this site we show how to use Premiere special effects to make still images appear to move.

If you're itching to put a piece of video into your story, it'll be well worth your time to learn how to capture it as best you can on the hardware and software available to you. It's not brain surgery, but there are a lot of factors to manage that make the difference between a grainy, jumpy clip and one that looks better than your original videotape. We could tell you what we know, but we'd rather you learn it from people who think about this full time. A software company called Terran Interactive has put together a great educational site called Making Multimedia Movies. It's geared toward the beginning moviemaker and includes a glossary to get you acquainted with important terms like compression, codecs, and dropped frames. Later parts of the site cross back over into our teaching territory, using Premiere to integrate video into the rest of your movie. If you get that far on the Terran site, come back and pick up with us where you left off. We'll go into much greater detail.

Finished capturing video? Perhaps you still have haven't covered these steps:

• Scanning and sizing still images
• Recording a Voiceover
• Capturing Musical Soundtracks