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Some Movie Maker Terminology

Movie Maker uses special video terms to refer to parts of a video production. You need to understand Movie Maker's terminology to use Movie Maker properly. Fortunately, the terms are fairly common and most people will know most of them already.

A video is a set of frames, or single pictures, linked together to produce, when viewed frame-after-frame, a movie. A still image is a single frame; a digital camera shoots still images just as your regular 35mm camera does. Movie Maker enables you to place still images in your videos to stop the action temporarily. In addition, you can save still images from single frames where you stop a video's playback.

A fundamental building block of a Movie Maker movie is a clip, or a short section of a video. The more you break your video into separate, small clips, the more manageable your video will be. The trade-off for having several clips is that you must keep track of more items. Like a book with many chapters, the separate clips help break down the video's content, letting you rearrange and edit specific parts of the video more easily.

Note

Movie Maker can automatically break videos into separate clips. When you load a video into Movie Maker from your camcorder or another source such as an MPEG video disk file, Movie Maker attempts to break your video into several clips. Often, Movie Maker makes correct assumptions about where to divide a video into a new clip, but sometimes Movie Maker can inadvertently divide a clip into two or more parts that you don't want broken into separate clips. You can merge these separate clips into a larger, single clip.

You'll assign names to clips so you can more easily reference the clips later. For example, if you've stored a video of a backyard barbeque on your computer, you can name one of the clips Dad In Apron. If you assign good, descriptive names, you won't have to play a clip to remember what it contains. After you've broken a video into clips, you can store those clips in other videos, produce stand-alone videos of the clip, and modify individual clips. A set of clips is called a collection. You can save a collection after you add or modify clips in the collection. Later, you can load a collection and work more on your video.

When you want to add sound to your videos, you add narration. You can also add background music from MP3 files stored on your computer, from MP3 files you download from the Internet, or from audio CDs you play.

Movie Maker enables you to make a slideshow (also called an illustrated video) of still images and add narration and background music to the slideshow. The images appear at time intervals you select, and the narration and background music appear on cue when you want them to. Unlike the My Picture's slideshow feature, Movie Maker gives you full control over the video's timing and sound because the pictures show one-by-one.

Throughout the next few sections, you'll see how you can use a storyboard approach to lay out what you want to appear in your video and then create the video using your storyboard as a guide. You'll adjust the way that clips transition from one clip to the next; for example, one clip might fade into another which is a process called cross-fading, whereas another clip might quickly slide from the left into the one previously showing in the video.

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