Filed under: Video, Features, Windows, Microsoft, Freeware, Open Source, How-Tos
Got your soda? Maybe some popcorn? Enjoyed the intermission, did you? I can tell, so welcome to the second half of our fine how-to on making your own semi-professional videos. If you missed the first part of this two-parter, you can find it here.
Task Four: Editing and effects
To edit my movie I used Windows XP's built-in Windows Movie Maker (you may need to download the newer version of it included with Windows XP SP2). Sure it has its glitches and problems, but it is A) free, B) available, and C) quick and dirty. If you don't have the latest version, it can be downloaded from Microsoft's website. The current version is 2.1. The interface is fairly simple and intuitive. You import or capture video from your hard drive or video camera, and edit away. Windows Movie Maker will walk you through adding effects, time lines, adding custom audio, transitions, credits, titles, annotations, etc. Since the specifics of using Windows Movie Maker are a bit nitty-gritty to detail in this post, here are some great tips and tricks to help you hot-rod the best performance out of WMM you can get.
- Windows Movie Maker has great clip splitting and joining tools.
- Be sure to have nothing else open when editing video on your PC. Required much memory is, young Skywalker. Sure, you want to have this article open to follow along, so that is okay, but you get the idea.
- Windows Movie Maker has an untimely fetish for crashing and making you want to chuck it, so save early, save often, and if it suddenly tanks, don't panic, if you save frequently, you won't have too much trouble. I had this problem with WMM, but I was only running 512MB of RAM at the time, so that could have been the issue. I have now upgraded, shame on me.
- When adding titles and other annotations, sometimes the title is too high on the screen, or won't behave and move down where you want it. To fix this little problem, simply hit enter, then space to create an invisible placeholder for the title to shift down. If WMM thinks you have something on each line, though a space doesn't display anything, it will move the text down to accommodate you. Take that you dopey title.
- The small preview window does help a lot, but sometimes gives a bad impression that your video isn't looking good, i.e. it will cut out and go black here and there for some reason during playback, but generally this is a glitch in the playback, not actual footage in your project, so don't mind it too much. Just be sure you watch your video before importing it to be sure you have good tape.
- As with many other video and audio programs, you can save WMM video project files in mid-edit, so make use of that, however, once you have imported video, you shouldn't move the original clip from its location since WMM will look for it and mess up your editing when it doesn't find that clip in the same spot on its next program startup. File location very important to WhaMMy here.
- Despite all the seemingly bad and unusable things I have mentioned about WMM, it really is a decent piece of software as far as features and capabilities go. A slightly better piece of hardware on my part, and better coding on Microsoft's part, and we could have a winner.
Continue reading Produce your own semi-professional videos - Part 2
