Windows Vista User Guide: Windows Movie Maker, Screenshots, Preview, Help, Aero, Sidebar, Microsoft, XP, Server, Linux, Mac

Windows movie Maker is an application that allows you to create movies/videos from clips, pictures and music. You can then put a movie together and place it on a dvd or cd. There are many options in movie maker for effects such as intro text and other effects which can be placed before or after any frame.

The screenshot above shows the main interface for Windows movie Maker. There are some options on the left which let you import media from a particular source, or choose which type of media you would like to import such as video, pictures and audio. Once you have some media imported into Windows Movie Maker, you can then place them into the timeline at the bottom of the window. You can also use the effects from the list on the left.

As you can see above, once you import your media, you can see them appear under the imported media section and tou can see them as thumbnails to make it easier to remember what clip is under a particular file.

To place a file into the tiumeline, just select the file you want and then drag it over to the part of the timeline. You can select the files from the timeline afterwards and drag them ovr to other parts if you wish. You can also delete them from the timeline by right clicking and selecting remove from timeline/delete.

Under the Edit section on the left of the main window you will see an effects section, this is for creating effects when fading in or out of a frame, you can quite a few choices as to what effect you want with window movie maker. You may wish to experiment with the different effects until you find the one best suited for your move. To select an effect for a particular frame, just drag the effect onto the frame you wish to use it on. You will notice an example of the ffect on the right hand side with the frame you are going to use it on.

You can use effects on as many frames as you want, to check them out on one of your frames just click the play button on the video on the right, whilst the frame is selected from the timeline.

You can select transitions also for fading in and out of frames, these are found just below the effects link under the Edit section. They are placed in the small box in between frames as they are used for fading from one to another, not like the effects which can be done on just one frame. Again you can see the transition in the window below:

Once again, you can view the preview by just clicking on the play button at the right hand side of the window. Once you have edited the movie with all the frames in the correct places and effect and transitions in place you are ready to publish the movie. This can be done by clicking on the Publish Movie button found at the toolbar at the top of the window. This will bring up a wizard shown below:

Select a name for your movie and a location, you may wish to use the default folder which is you movies directory found under the documents folder.

In the next section, you can select compression settings, this can be selected depending on the queality you require vs. the amount of space you have on the media you are going to be copying it to. If you are going to be viewing it only on your pc you can select best quality for playback on my computer (reccomended). If you are saving say a big movie onto a cd you may wish to compress it to a certain size which can be done by selecting the exact value. You may also wish to use some pre defined settings for compression from the next check box called More settings. DV-AVI(PAL) is the exact quality that you would record from a DV camera and would take up the most space on your hard disk or dvd. If you are planning on re uploading a movie back to a camera this setting should be used. There are other settings including 2Mbps which are all of high quality, you should experiment on a small video if you are unsure on the quality settings. Once you have finished off choosing the quality, click the Publish button.