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When November comes around it usually signals year-end vacations, bored kids out of school and gatherings of family or friends. Wouldn’t it be great if you could survive the gatherings, have a memorable vacation and keep the kids occupied? The answer you’re looking for lies in three words, Windows Movie Maker.
The Microsoft team has been rolling out a number of new wares including software such the latest version of Movie Maker.
The simple video editing system works on Vista and the new Operating System Windows 7, and like in the past, is available for download free of charge.
But unlike the past don’t search under Microsoft downloads but head to the Windows Live website and look under “More” where downloads is one option.
While there’s some hunting around to be done, it’s worth the tour as the Live site offers many useful freebies such as SkyDrive, for free online storage and Spaces, which is your own online presence. Both of course, work very well with what you can get out of Windows Movie Maker.
Whether they are shots from a phone camera, still camera or handy cam, you will be able to create something.
Most Singapore school children get a crash course in movie-editing, so you can easily leave the kids to work on creating a slide-show or movie from the family get-together or vacation.
Since most 10-year-olds are able to get around Movie Maker, there’s little excuse whether you’re aged 20 or 70, not to learn how to use it too.
If you’ve never attempted online editing, the new Movie Maker is a good starting point.
However, if you’re used to the earlier versions, you’ll find it a breeze as the new system is much friendlier with fewer bells and whistles that only some would miss – such as the option to view in timeline or storyboard mode and the ability to re-arrange audio that has been laid down.
The new Movie Maker opens in the ribbon, or tabbed, mode which is in keeping with the overall new look from Windows and Microsoft.
To start a new project, you simply import the raw material which can be dragged and dropped into place. As simple as that.
If you want music, click on the musical note and choose either from the standard pieces or your personal library. What’s handy is that you can also set your clip to end nicely with your piece of music with one click.
Adding captions and credits is just as simple, just enter the text (you can copy and paste even) before choosing where you want it by dragging the text bar in place with the mouse.
You can add to both text as well as images, visual effects and animation for something different, although some of these work only on photos.
Compared to more fussy editing systems, which some try to explain away under the excuse of being “professional”, there is little time spent on needless rendering before effects can be viewed. This is useful – what you see is what you get and if you don’t like it, change it or choose Undo.
The work area is also much neater, there’s no clutter as everything you need to call up is up on the ribbon interface.
You can click to splice your video even though they appear as thumbnail images or re-arrange a sequence by dragging the thumbnails into place.
There are options aplenty when you delve deeper by clicking on the tabs which although not confusing, need some experimenting to fully understand their capabilities such as changing the duration of an effect and what an animation results in.
When you are satisfied with your piece you can post it immediately onto YouTube or Facebook.
There’s also the option to save your clip to play on mobiles or even in HD, although I didn’t quite see much difference in my HD WMV clip.
What’s also nice is that Movie Maker creates a great video slide-show out of a collection of photos.
After a class reunion and countless snap shots, Windows Movie Maker was called into action to produce a priceless keepsake shared via email, on mobiles and FB (view the clip on Channelnewsasia's Facebook page ).
The fact that it was a quick and painless creation was for some, hard to imagine.
If all the various tabs and steps seem too much for you, just hit the Auto Movie button, it offers what it states – a movie put together with default settings that takes out all the guesswork.
This is a new feature of Movie Maker that creates a video clip in one minute and with about three button clicks. Now that’s movie magic !
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