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Editing Digital Video with Windows Live Movie Maker (part 7) - Editing Your Video - Getting a Bit More Sophisticated

1/27/2014 3:28:21 AM
5.5. Getting a Bit More Sophisticated

While simple home movies and photo slide shows are fun, you may occasionally want to make something a bit more sophisticated. For example, maybe you have a recorded TV show you'd like to edit. You will want to remove the dead space at the beginning and end of the show, at the very least. This was documented in the previous section and is an easy fix. But what if you also want to take the time to edit out any commercials, or edit out other bits of video that exist in the middle of a clip? You actually can do this with Windows Live Movie Maker, though the process is far more complicated in this version of the application and is not documented. It's time to see how it works.

If you don't have a recorded TV show, perhaps because your PC isn't connected to a TV signal through a TV tuner card, fear not. You can use one of the sample recorded TV shows that comes with Media Center, or a sample video file that ships with Windows Vista. Or, grab some of your own home video footage. It's up to you.


NOTE

Recorded TV shows are stored in C:\Users\Public\Recorded TV by default. There's no Recorded TV folder under a normal user account's Home folder. That's because recorded TV shows are shared by all of the users on the PC.

You may recall that each video clip you import into Windows Live Movie Maker is just a shortcut to an underlying file. As you make changes to that clip in your Movie Maker project—by adding things like transitions, effects, titles, and trims—the underlying file is not changed in any way. This is all fairly straightforward. But what you may not realize is that you can import the same video file into your project multiple times. This enables you to trim it down multiple times, into discrete and different video clips, each of which can contain a unique part of the video.

Consider Figure 17, a conceptual diagram representing a 30-minute TV show. In this fictional TV show, there is some introductory material (commercials, content from the previous show), some actual TV show content, a single commercial in the middle (hey, it's conceptual not realistic), more TV show content, and then some junk at the end (commercials, and perhaps the start of the next show).

Figure 17. Sometimes it helps to think of a TV show or other digital video file in terms of the content you want to keep and the content you'd like to edit out.

What you want from this video is the two bits of actual content, but none of the commercials and other non-TV show content. We know that Windows Live Movie Maker offers a way to trim the beginning and end of a single video clip, so that part of it is easy enough. What it doesn't offer is a way to trim out part of the middle of a clip. This seems insurmountable until you realize that you can simply import the same video file twice. (In this example, anyway. If you were really going to use this tool to edit out all of the commercials from a typical TV show, you'd have to import the same file several times.)

Here's how it works:

  1. Start a new Movie Maker project by choosing New from the Application menu.

  2. Using drag and drop or the Add button, import the recorded TV show or other video file you'd like to edit. This imported file will be used to create the first clip, sequentially.

  3. Using the Trim functionality described in the previous section, trim off the beginning portions of the video that you'd like to leave out. Then, trim the end portion of the video clip so that the edited video ends right before the first commercial.

  4. Click Save and close to save the changes.

  5. Now, import the same file a second time and ensure that this second version appears to the right of the first, as shown in Figure 18.

    Figure 18. There's no reason you can't import two or more copies of the same video clip.
  6. With the second clip selected, go into Edit and then Trim again. This time, the open trim should start at the conclusion of the first set of commercials; and the end trim should be made at the conclusion of the TV show content. (If you're editing a real TV show, you will need to repeat this process for as many commercial breaks as there really are.)

When you're done, you can play back your completed project, ensuring that no commercials escaped your attention and that the edits were as clean as possible. Remember that you can always go back and re-edit any trims, and you can add transitions to smooth out jarring clip changes.

When you're done—voilà!—you've got a nicely edited TV show, sans commercials. Or perhaps a home video, without the boring parts.

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