Adding Narration to Your Video

As I mentioned earlier in the article, creating a video in Movie Maker can be beneficial for tutorials as well as for presentations. A voice over (narration) audio can be done along with the graphics, so it appears like a conversation or like a presentation in front of a full auditorium.

To begin a narration, select Tools > Narrate Timeline. This opens a new area on the main screen, where you can then select “Start Narration”. This is all fairly straightforward. Movie Maker records your voice through a microphone, and saves it in sync with the video you have created. It adds this as a new audio layer to the timeline.

Import Video from a Digital Media Source

Windows Movie Maker can import from a digital video camera. The autoplay feature in Windows Vista will allow you import video directly to your computer. Once you have imported the video from your digital video camera, you can edit the footage in Movie Maker. You can Some digital video cameras use their own proprietry importing software and even file formats for HD. This might mean that you would have to get the footage off the camera using their software first before importing it to Movie Maker from the Movie Maker task sidebar.

Editing Existing Clips

Once you have footage imported and in the timeline, you an cut out embarrassing moments, crop boring moments or whatever it may be that needs editing.

If you have sections you want to remove, you can drag the ends backwards along the timeline to cut those sections. This is similar to how we shortened the audio file earlier in the article.

You can also split a clip in half. You can do this multiple times to create smaller segments of your video. Those smaller segments can then be trimmed down even more by splitting them. In this way, you can weed out the unnecessary video and only keep the valuable content.

To perform a split, play the video to the part where you want to split, pause it, and then click the split icon below the media preview box. 

Editing Video in Movie Maker

1. Import an existing video file in Movie Maker.
2. Drag the video to the video timeline.
3. Play the video and pause it where you want to make the first split. For our example, we want to remove a middle portion of the movie, so we make a split at the beginning of the portion we want to cut.
4. The green line in the timeline shows where you are at in the movie. The movie preview should update frame by frame as you drag the square green box to the left or right. This takes you to exactly the point you want to edit out.
   
   

   

5. Split the frames at the end point of the unwanted portion.
6. Select the unwanted portion in the timeline and hit delete on the keyboard.
   
   
   

Now that you have performed a simple edit. You may need to fine tune the area that remains. You could add transitions between the two clips if they don’t mesh well together. You could also pull a clip from another video source and paste it between the two clips. In this way, you could create a montage for a more cinematic experience.