Movie Maker Basics
Movie Maker was first packaged with Windows distributions way back with Windows ME. The current 6.0 version comes pre-installed with Windows Vista and has taken serious steps towards becoming the end-all-be-all movie editing software for amateurs. Windows XP users have Windows Movie Maker 2.0.
With Movie Maker you can create photo albums with music, edit film, customize transitions from one clip to another, and even create business presentations for the web. Movie Maker can import movies, images and audio files in all sorts of formats. The Home Premium and Ultimate editions of Windows Vista come installed with a more robust version of Movie Maker. This version allows for processing of MPEG-2 codec files which are often the format of recorded TV and DVD source films. Unfortunately, the other versions of Vista don’t have this capability. These two versions of Windows also allow for manipulating high definition (HD) video files.
You can find Movie Maker under Start Menu > All Programs.Once you’ve opened Movie Maker, you should notice the blank media screen, the storyboard running along the bottom, the tasks on the left side, and a few options in the toolbar. We will guide you through creating your first photo movie in Movie Maker, complete with your own audio and pictures. We’ll then talk about editing clips to create a new movie.
Creating a Photo Movie with Music
A photo movie has still photos transitioning with music playing in the background. You may want to create a movie like this for a wedding reception, birthday party, anniversary celebration. It’s also a great way to create an album of photos from an event to show to your friends and family. It can be burned to DVD or even uploaded to YouTube. We will take you step by step through the process.
1. Open Windows Movie Maker.
2. Select Import Media from the toolbar.
3. Choose the pictures on your hard drive you want to import into the photo movie. You can select multiple photos in the dialog window. Hold CTRL and then left click each photo you wish to add. When finished, select Import.
4. The images should load alongside the video area, with the first image filling the video slot. If you imported an image you don’t want in the photo movie, simple select it and hit delete on the keyboard.
5. Now we can begin to craft our storyboard. We drag each picture down to a slot on the storyboard to setup the sequence of photos. This is the order they will play in once we have completed.
6. At this point, you could push the play button and each photo would cycle through in the video area. Under Tasks on the left sidebar, select Import Audio.
7. An explorer window takes you to your computer’s hard drive for an audio file in MP3 format or other compatible formats. Select the file, and then choose Import.
8. The first item in the imported media list should be the audio file. Right click the audio file and select add to storyboard. The first time you do this, a message appears telling you the view has changed from Storyboard view to Timeline View.
The photo movie should now have an audio layer with pictures. The audio layer in our case was far longer than the few photos we included. We would either want to add enough photos to absorb the length of the entire song, or we could drag the edge of the audio clip back towards the photos to crop it’s length to fit the photo collection. This is described in more detail below.