Up until this point I've been playing with my video on my MacBook Pro, but the majority of people out there aren't lucky enough to have a Mac. So today I'm playing around with editing some video on a HP Pavilion machine running MS Windows XP Media Center (2005). It's an inexpensive machine costing only $400 after a $50 rebate. It has an AMD Athlon 64 processor 3800+ 2.41 GHz and 960MB of RAM. So not much firepower here. :-) I have Service Pac 2 installed, so the Windows Movie Maker program is automatically installed. I tried to download the program directly from the site, but had trouble doing so. Here are the instructions from the Microsoft site:
Movie Maker 2.1 is available for download with Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2). You can download SP2, Movie Maker 2.1, and all future critical updates automatically by turning on the Automatic Updates feature in Windows XP.
You can also download SP2 and Movie Maker 2.1 from Microsoft Update. If you cannot use Automatic Updates or download SP2 via Windows Update, order a CD.
I tried to see if the program could be downloaded alone without the Automatic Updates feature and was unable to. First, the site didn't like that I was using FireFox instead of IE, then I was forced to download an .exe file to validate that I indeed owned my copy of Windows XP. After that I couldn't find the program for XP, only Vista. What a hassle, but most people will already have the program installed if they run automatic updates, so it wasn't too much of a big deal. You can find information about the Windows Movie Maker program here.
I started out by importing some AVI video files from an external hard drive that I have attached to the PC. The video I was playing with last week on the Mac is stored there. Some of the files came over, but the ones I converted from the HD format didn't work. I kept getting an error message. Files from the Flip Mino worked fine, so I plugged in the Flip to see if I could capture directly from the camera. You can't actually capture live video from the Flip, so I had to import the clips from the camera into MM like I did the ones on the hard drive. When I tried to capture the video, however, my webcam came on and the program opened up a video capture wizard to walk me through the process of setting up my QuickCam with MM. MM captures the webcam video in 512kbps in WMV format at 320x240 display size and 15 frames per second. This is what was recommended if I planned to edit the files in the program.
The files I imported from the Mac via my hard drive didn't look great in MM, so I'm going to stick with files I imported directly from the Flip Mino for now. But I must say, I'm not sure what the program is doing to the files on import, but it is taking forever. I definitely need more RAM on this machine if I'm going to be editing video, so I'm going to buy some before I talking my editing in Windows Movie Maker. Instead I'll tell you a little about the features of this free program.
MM has most of the basic movie making features like transitions, special effects, titles, credits, narration and music. Your options are just limited, although Microsoft does have some "Creative Fun Packs" that you can download to add more features to MM. You can edit your video in both storyboard view and timeline view. The timeline views consist of one video with accompanying audio bar, one music/audio bar, and one titles bar.When in storyboard view, the video project appears as a film strip showing each scene in clips. Windows Movie Maker can only export video in Windows Media formats (WMV) or DV AVI. Both are fine for viewing on a PC. I do like how it has some predefined profiles and users can create custom profiles which utilize newer codecs.
So I'll give Windows Movie Maker a run through after I've install more memory in my PC, and I'll be back to share the experience with you in Part IV of this Summer Project Video Series. Visit Coop's Word Wiki for more information on my research.
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