A few Vista Movie Maker discoveries
Posted by Curt Franklin on 3 March, 2008
I’ve been playing with the various settings in Windows Movie Maker for Vista, and I’ve found several things that might be useful:
1. Movie Maker CAN create clips automatically when importing from a video camera.
When you bring your footage over, the default behavior is to break it into (roughly) five-second segments. You can go into the Tools –> Options menu and change the length of the clips. You can also tell it not to break the imported footage into clips.
2. Movie Maker WILL NOT create clips automatically when importing an existing video file.
The only behavior I find (or find any reference to) is importing the existing file as one large piece of video. Now, once the file is imported, you can go to the Tools –> Create Clips menu and have Move Maker break the video into clips for you. As with the clips you import from a camera, you can change the length of the clips in Tools — > Options.
3. Movie Maker doesn’t make ANY CHANGES to the original video file.
This is important: Movie Maker brings a COPY of the original file into memory, and works on the copy. The project file, and any edits or changes you make to the video, are stored as a set of pointers to the original file. If you want to keep track of the changes, you have to save your project. If you want to have a video file that reflects your changes, you have to export (create a movie of) the project. This can be a fine thing to do, but be careful: All the video that we’re working with involves compression. If you continually export a video from your work, then re-import the saved video and work from that (then export your work, and start the whole cycle over the next time), you’ll eventually degrade the quality of the copy you’re working from with highly unpredictable results.
If you’re working from a USB-connected hard disk, you’ll want to make sure that the disk always attaches with the same drive letter designation. If it doesn’t, then the pointers to the original file can be messed up. If anyone’s interested, I can find a tutorial on how to do this, or catch me before class, and I can show you how.
