Logo
CAR REVIEW
Windows Vista
Windows 7
Windows Azure
Windows Server
Windows Phone
PREGNANCY
 
 
Windows 7

Editing Digital Video with Windows Live Movie Maker (part 1) - Starting Windows Live Movie Maker

1/27/2014 3:19:50 AM

Microsoft first created an application called Windows Movie Maker as part of Windows Millennium Edition (Windows Me), which shipped back in 2000. Since then, both Windows XP and Vista also included updated versions of Windows Movie Maker. With Windows 7, Microsoft has stripped Movie Maker out of the operating system and made it part of the freely downloadable Windows Live Essentials suite instead. That way, the company can update the product more frequently and meet the product bundling requirements of various governments around the world. As always, we assume that you or your PC maker has downloaded and installed Windows Live Essentials. If not, you can find the suite at http://download.live.com.

Windows Live Movie Maker is Microsoft's tool for creating and editing digital videos and publishing them to the Web. You can import a variety of digital media types into the application, including home movies, photos, music and other audio files, and even recorded TV shows. Then, using simple editing techniques along with professional transitions and effects, you can create completed videos that can be shared with others on the Web.

NOTE

Windows Live Movie Maker can also output video files to your hard drive, but only in a limited range of formats. This is by design: whereas previous versions of Windows Movie Maker were aimed mostly at home users with camcorders who wanted to share videos in a variety of ways, including via DVD, times have changed, and Windows Live Movie Maker addresses those changes. Now, instead of supporting a bunch of special use cases, the application does what most people want: it publishes to the Web.

NOTE

While we focus on Windows Live Movie Maker, you may want to overcome some of its limitations and access some old-school publishing options. You can do so by downloading and installing Windows Live Movie Maker 2.6 for Windows Vista (it works fine in Windows 7 as well). This older version of Movie Maker—dating from the XP days—features a simple user interface, numerous effects and transitions, and decent titling capabilities. Best of all, it's ideally suited for creating desktop-oriented video files of various resolutions and quality levels. You can download Windows Live Movie Maker 2.6 from the Microsoft Web site: www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=D6BA5972-328E-4DF7-8F9D-068FC0F80CFC&displaylang=en.

Windows Live Movie Maker is a simple and straightforward application, assuming you're comfortable with video editing. (And heck, who isn't?) But even for the uninitiated, Windows Live Movie Maker is pretty easy to use. You just need to know your way around.

1. Starting Windows Live Movie Maker

Typically, you start Windows Live Movie Maker by launching its shortcut from the Start menu. (Type movie in the Search box to find it quickly.) You can also find it buried in the Start menu All Programs list under Windows Live. The Windows Live Movie Maker application window is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Windows Live Movie Maker is decidedly simpler than its predecessors.

NOTE

In increasingly rare cases, you may get an error message when you try to launch Windows Live Movie Maker. If you see an error dialog like that shown in Figure 2, then your PC is not powerful enough to run Windows Live Movie Maker.

Figure 2. Uh-oh: it's time to upgrade.

You will only see this dialog if your PC does not meet the performance requirements for the application. These requirements include 1GB of RAM, a single-core 2.4 GHz or faster processor, and a video card that supports DirectX 9.0c (or later) and Pixel Shader 2.0 (or later). But we don't want to get bogged down in technical jargon here. If you have a reasonably modern computer, you'll have no issues with Movie Maker. We've successfully run Windows Live Movie Maker on a low-end netbook featuring a dual-core Atom processor running at just 1.6 GHz and utilizing integrated graphics, for example. So if you do see this dialog, you probably shouldn't even be running Windows 7.

Other -----------------
- Managing Digital Movies (part 4) - Watching and Managing Movies with Windows Media Center
- Managing Digital Movies (part 3) - Watching and Managing Movies with Windows Media Player,
- Managing Digital Movies (part 2) - Watching and Managing Movies with Windows Live Photo Gallery
- Managing Digital Movies (part 1) - Managing Digital Movies with the Windows 7 Shell
- Microsoft Visio 2010 : Sharing and Publishing Diagrams - Publishing Visio Drawings to SharePoint 2010 Visio Services
- Microsoft Visio 2010 : Sharing and Publishing Diagrams - Saving Visio-Created Websites on a SharePoint Server
- Microsoft Visio 2010 : Sharing and Publishing Diagrams - Customizing Diagrams Saved as Websites
- Microsoft Visio 2010 : Creating and Validating Process Diagrams - Reusing Existing Validation Rules
- Microsoft Visio 2010 : Creating and Exporting SharePoint Workflow Diagrams
- Microsoft OneNore 2010 : Opening a Backup Copy of a Notebook Section
- Microsoft OneNore 2010 : Backing Up Notebooks Manually,Choosing How to Back Up Notebooks
- Microsoft Visio 2010 : Creating and Validating Process Diagrams - Creating Subprocesses
- Microsoft Visio 2010 : Creating and Validating Process Diagrams - Understanding BPMN, Creating and Validating BPMN Diagrams
- Microsoft Visio 2010 : Creating and Validating Process Diagrams - Understanding Visio Rules , Validating Flowcharts
- Microsoft Project 2010 : Tracking Progress on Tasks (part 4) - Entering Actual Values for Tasks
- Microsoft Project 2010 : Tracking Progress on Tasks (part 3) - Entering a Task’s Completion Percentage
- Microsoft Project 2010 : Tracking Progress on Tasks (part 2) - Tracking a Project as Scheduled
- Microsoft Project 2010 : Tracking Progress on Tasks (part 1) - Saving a Project Baseline
- Microsoft Excel 2010 : Calculating the Median
- Microsoft Excel 2010 : Calculating the Mean (part 3) - Minimizing the Spread - Setting Up the Worksheet for Solver
 
 
Most view of day
- Microsoft Visio 2010 : Formatting Individual Shapes (part 1) - Which Formatting Attributes Can Be Edited?
- Maintaining Desktop Health : Using Task Scheduler (part 2) - Task Scheduler Security, Task Scheduler User Interface
- BizTalk Server 2006 : Pipeline Component Best Practices and Examples - Using PGP (part 2) - PGP Decode Component
- Microsoft SharePoint 2013 : Looking at Visio Services (part 4) - Visio Services security considerations,Supported data scenarios
- Windows Server 2012 Group Policies and Policy Management : Understanding Group Policy (part 3) - GPO Filtering, Group Policy Loopback Processing
- Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 : Managing Message Pickup, Replay, Throttling, and Back Pressure (part 2) - Configuring Message Throttling
- Windows Server 2008 R2 : Creating and Administering Hyper-V Virtual Machines (part 2) - Installing the guest operating system
- Microsoft Excel 2010 : Inserting Blank Rows (part 2) - Separating Subtotaled Rows for Distributed Files
- Windows Phone 8 : Configuring Basic Device Settings - Controlling the Keyboard’s Behavior (part 2) - Clearing Custom Suggestions
- Advanced Windows 7 Programming : Working in the Background - DEVELOPING TRIGGER-START SERVICES (part 1)
Top 10
- Windows Phone 8 : Scheduled Tasks - Scheduled Task API Limitations
- Windows Phone 8 : Scheduled Tasks - Updating Tiles Using a Scheduled Task Agent
- Windows Phone 8 : Scheduled Tasks - To-Do List Scheduled Task Sample (part 5) - Editing an Existing To-Do Item
- Windows Phone 8 : Scheduled Tasks - To-Do List Scheduled Task Sample (part 4) - Creating the To-Do Item Shell Tile, Saving a To-Do Item
- Windows Phone 8 : Scheduled Tasks - To-Do List Scheduled Task Sample (part 3) - Debugging Scheduled Tasks
- Windows Phone 8 : Scheduled Tasks - To-Do List Scheduled Task Sample (part 2) - TodoService, TodoItemViewModel
- Windows Phone 8 : Scheduled Tasks - To-Do List Scheduled Task Sample (part 1) - TodoItem,TodoDataContext
- Windows Phone 8 : Scheduled Tasks - Using Scheduled Tasks
- Windows Phone 8 : Scheduled Tasks - Background Agent Types
- Windows Phone 8 : Windows Phone Toolkit Animated Page Transitions - Reusing the Transition Attached Properties
 
 
Windows XP
Windows Vista
Windows 7
Windows Azure
Windows Server
Windows Phone
2015 Camaro