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Creating home movies
YOU have the inspiration. You have the motivation. You just need the right equipment. For what? To bring your visions, dreams and ideas to life, of course. We’re talking about you making your own home movies and music videos and the easiest way to do this is with Windows Movie Maker (WMM) 2.1.
WMM 2 makes making home movies a lot of fun. You can create, edit, delete and share your home movies on your computer or build your movie with a few simple drag-and-drops. It offers far more editing capabilities for those who need them. For users not interested in the time-consuming process of editing, it offers an incredible AutoMovie tool that takes raw videos and creates professionally-edited final movies without any user intervention
The best part is that Movie Maker is already included as part of Windows XP. To get the latest version, simply use the Windows update feature. So let’s get started.
Requirements for video capture
The first thing you need is a way to transfer your videos into your computer. This requires different capture hardware depending on the source of your video. If you have a digital video (DV) camera, you’ll need either an IEEE 1394 card or an analog video capture card. IEEE 1394 is recommended for the best results. If you have an analog video camera or a VCR, you will need to have an analog video capture card.
Getting started
To start video editing, we will first have to “capture” the video from, for example, the tape onto our hard drives. For this, if you connect a DV camera or other similar device to your PC, an option called Capture Video using Windows Movie Maker will automatically appear. However, for analog capture or more manual control, you will have to launch WMM 2 and select Capture Video from the file menu. Either option will display the Video Capture Wizard. Savvy users can uncover bitrate, display size, frame rate, and other technical information if needed.
When you capture or import a video, WMM 2 creates a collection. A WMM 2 collection represents the underlying raw video, but you can also add other content to a collection, including images and audio files. This collection is what you will use to make your own home video especially in AutoMovie.
From here, if you drag one or more clips to the storyboard/timeline, you will have started what WMM 2 calls a project. A WMM 2 project is an arranged sequence of clips and their associated soundtrack, narration, background music, titles, video effects, and transitions; that is, what you’ll see on your screen.
Making videos fast
So in WMM 2, look at the default task pane and you’ll see three main movie tasks: capture video, edit movie and finish movie. And no step is more automated (or more fun) than the AutoMovie option under Edit Movie. This can automatically convert your video footage into MTV-like music videos, using selectable themes to control the style and pace.
AutoMovie is a wizard that analyses the video and audio content in your movie, finds the best content, takes at least a segment of each clip and intelligently arranges it into a finished movie. The results, put simply, are astounding and AutoMovie has default editing styles that should please just about everyone.
AutoMovie can create a highlights movie, with clean edits and simple cuts, fades, and titles. But it offers other exciting choices, such as music video, where you can select the background music and have the wizard edit your video to the length of the music, adding transitions that match the beats of the music. There are also flip and slide, old movie, and sports highlights editing styles.
After you selected a collection with which to make a finished movie, select “make an AutoMovie” from the movie tasks pane. The display will change, letting you choose an AutoMovie editing style; then, you can enter a title and select the background music. In this second option, you can select the audio level on a slider between the audio from the video and that from the song; for example, you might want the song to completely replace the video’s soundtrack, depending on the source material. Then, just create the AutoMovie.
But AutoMovie doesn’t have to be an end-point because it creates a standard WMM 2 project that you can edit later to your heart’s content. If you don’t like the title style the wizard chose, just change it to any one of the 43 title styles that are supplied. Even can change a video effect or a transition. For even more information on how to use WMM 2, visit www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/movie-maker/getstarted/default.mspx
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