InformIT: Sams Teach Yourself Microsoft Windows XP in 24 Hours

An Overview of Movie Maker's Use

Windows Movie Maker is actually not as jam-packed full of features as other video-editing software that you can get, but as you've already seen in this hour, Movie Maker can do quite a lot. Movie Maker is an excellent introduction to digital video production and management.

Although making video productions with Movie Maker could consume an entire 24-hour tutorial itself, the following To Do items walk you through some common tasks you'll perform with Movie Maker.

To Do: Loading an Existing Clip into Movie Maker

Suppose you have a video clip already on your computer and you want to load that clip into Movie Maker and work with it. Start Movie Maker.
Select File, Import and select the file. If you want Movie Maker to break the file into clips automatically, leave the option labeled Create Clips for Video Files checked.

After the video imports, your screen will show the video, broken into clips, such as the one in Figure 23.2.

Figure 23.2 Movie Maker automatically breaks your video into clips.

You cannot immediately save your video as a Movie Maker movie because Movie Maker assumes you need to edit the movie first. Otherwise, why would you have imported it? Therefore, you must now learn to work with clips as the next To Do item explains.

To Do: Working with Movie Maker Clips

You can play an individual clip by double-clicking it. The clip appears in the preview area where you can replay the clip.
Click the Full Screen button under the preview to donate your entire screen to the playback of the clip.
Press Esc to return to the Movie Maker screen.
Click the Next Frame and Previous Frame buttons to step through your video one frame at a time.
If you want to divide a single clip into additional clips, locate the exact spot where you want to divide the original clip. Pause the clip at the approximate location where you want to split the clip and click Next Frame or Previous Frame until you locate the exact spot of the division.
Click the Split Clip button under the preview area to split the clip at the current location. You can further divide the clip if you want.
To name a clip, click it to select it and press F2. You might not want to name all the clips, but you can name pivotal clips that you might later need to return to for further editing.
One way to name a clip and add other information to it is to select the clip and then choose Properties from the clip's right-click menu. Doing so displays the clip's Properties window shown in Figure 23.3. You can click on any value and set or change that value. Click the window's Close button to save your changes.

Figure 23.3 See and modify the clip's properties.
Generally, Movie Maker errs on the side of generating too many clips when you import a video. You can easily combine multiple clips by selecting the clips to combine. Hold down the Ctrl key while clicking to select all the clips that you want to combine into one clip. Right-click your selection and choose Combine from the pop-up menu to combine the clips.
To see more detail about your clips, select View, Details to change the collections area from a list of thumbnail images of each clips'first frame to a list of clips that includes the clip size, date modified, and other information. Figure 23.4 shows this detailed view of the clips.

Figure 23.4 A detailed collections area might help you more than thumbnails at times.

After you've broken a video into appropriate clips and named them, you're ready to combine the clips into a final movie. You'll work from the storyboard as the following To Do item explains.

To Do: Using the Storyboard

The storyboard is where you place clips in the order you want them to appear in your final movie. Select a clip and drag the clip to the first, leftmost cell of the storyboard. Select another clip and drag it to the second storyboard cell. Continue adding clips in whatever order you want them to appear.
Select View, Timeline to view the storyboard's timeline. The timeline appears above the storyboard. As Figure 23.5 shows, the clips'opening frames do not all fully appear in the storyboard. The width of each clip shows, relatively, how long the clip is in relation to the other clips. The clips that are longer than a regular storyboard cell display with part of their title to the right to fill the time width. As you add clips, the storyboard's timeline updates to show you how much time is being consumed by the movie.

Figure 23.5 Your storyboard shows your movie's clip order and each clip's relative time.
You can rearrange clips inside the storyboard, but before you do, turn off the display of the storyboard's timeline. Without the timeline, the clips all display with the same width and are much easier to arrange. Anytime you select a clip in the storyboard, the clip's opening frame appears in the preview area so you can review the clip.
After you place several clips in the storyboard, you can play your entire storyboard movie by right-clicking anywhere on the storyboard and selecting the option labeled Play Entire Storyboard/Timeline. As your movie plays, a hairline passes along the storyboard's timeline showing you exactly where the movie's current play point is.
When you are satisfied with your movie, select File, Save Movie to display Figure 23.6's Save Movie dialog box. Before you click OK to save the movie, take a moment to analyze and adjust the fields, if necessary. The dialog box's most important element is the Setting value you select. You can select from the drop-down list box to specify exactly how much quality the saved movie is to consume. The better the quality, the more disk space the movie will occupy and the slower the download speeds will be if you send the movie to a Web page or to someone via e-mail. The file size and the estimated download times change as you select a different quality setting. Use the estimated download times to determine just how much quality your video warrants. You want to save the movie with the highest quality possible while, at the same time, maintaining a fair trade-off of download speeds and file size.

Figure 23.6 Adjust the video's quality and enter title information before saving the movie.

Preserve your clips after you've saved them to disk. You might need to shorten some of the clips to meet your goals for your movie. Instead of changing a clip, you can trim the clip as it resides in the storyboard without changing the clip in the collections area. The following To Do item explains how to trim the clips in your storyboard without changing the original clip file.

To Do: Trimming Clips in the Storyboard

After you've moved clips to your storyboard, click to select the clip in the storyboard area. Start and stop trim point arrows appear on either side of the clip in the storyboard area.
Click Play to begin playing the clip.
When the clip gets to the point where you want to begin trimming, press Ctrl+Shift+Left Arrow to set the leftmost trim point. If you don't set a left trim point, Movie Maker assumes you want the clip to begin at its normal starting position.
When the clip gets to the point where you want to end trimming, press Ctrl+Shift+Right Arrow to set the rightmost trim point. If you don't set a right trim point, Movie Maker assumes you want the clip to end at its normal stopping position. As you set trim points, Movie Maker changes the clip's width inside the storyboard and displays the trim points on the storyboard's clip when you select the clip. Trimming the storyboard clip does not change the clip.

If your storyboard clips get too thin to manage easily, click the Zoom In button to the left of the storyboard. Your storyboard clip's width expands because the timeline on the storyboard grows. The top figure in Figure 23.7 shows a storyboard before the zoom, and the bottom figure in Figure 23.7 shows a storyboard after zooming in. Although you'll have to scroll the storyboard left and right more for long movies, zoomed-in storyboards are often easier to adjust.

Figure 23.7 Top: A storyboard gets cramped before zooming. Bottom: The zoomed-in storyboard is easier to manage.

Inside the storyboard, any and all clips that contain audio show a speaker icon in the clip's lower-left corner. You can add additional audio and you can place a soundtrack such as narration over a movie that doesn't currently have sound. You'll add audio clips to your movies using virtually the same method you use when you add video clips. The following To Do explains how to add such narration.

To Do: Adding Sound to the Storyboard

Choose File, Import to load an audio clip into your collections area.
Drag the audio clip to the storyboard. The storyboard area's audio bar shows the audio track.
You can overlap audio clips within a video clip. Drag the rightmost audio clip to the left on the storyboard's audio bar to overlap the clip with a previous one or simply to start the audio earlier in the movie. As with video clips, you can trim an audio clip after you've selected it.

If you want to use Movie Maker to record video clips instead of recording the clips outside of Movie Maker and then importing them, you can collect video and audio recordings directly from within Movie Maker's application as the following To Do item explains.

To Do: Recording Directly Within Movie Maker

Click the toolbar's Record button. Figure 23.8's Record dialog box opens. Depending on your graphics card, you might see more options available to those who can capture video directly.

Figure 23.8 Set your record options from the Record dialog box.
Select the recording device, either an audio device or video device depending on what kind of clip you want to record.
Adjust the recording time limit and click the Create Clips option if you want Movie Maker to request that Movie Maker divide the video into separate clips.
Adjust the quality and click Record. If you are recording video, the video appears in the Record window's Preview area.

Click Stop when you want to stop the recording. Movie Maker opens the Save Windows Media File window where you can name your clip file and select a storage location. The recorded clip appears in your collections area where you can then transfer the clip to its appropriate place in the storyboard.

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