LERANINGS OF THE WEEK (Ana Lea Cacayorin)

I learned how to use the Windows Movie Maker this week.

Windows Movie Maker is video creating/editing software bundled with the Microsoft Windows operating system since Windows Me. It contains features such as effects, transitions, titles/credits, audio track, timeline narration, and Auto Movie. New effects and transitions can be made and existing ones can be modified using XML code.

The Video and Music/Audio bars can be "cut" to any number of short segments, which will play together seamlessly, but the individual segments are isolated editing-wise, so that for example, the music volume can be lowered for just a few seconds while someone is speaking.

The efficiency of the importing and editing process is heavily dependent on the amount of file fragmentation of the hard disk. The most reliable results can be obtained by adding an extra hard disk dedicated for scratch space, and regularly re-formatting/defragmenting it, rather than simply deleting the files at the end of the project. Fragmented AVI files result in jerky playback on the editing screen, and make the final rendering process much longer.

All Windows Vista versions require pixel shader hardware support. Some systems might not be able to run the newer version. Therefore, Microsoft has also released an updated older version 2.6 for Windows Vista on the Microsoft Download Center. This version requires Windows Vista and allows the use of Windows Movie Maker on systems where the Windows Vista version cannot be run.

In June 2008, a memo purportedly by Bill Gates from January 2003 was circulated on the Internet in which he heavily criticized the downloading process for Movie Maker at the time.[13]. The memo was originally made available online as part of the plaintiffs' evidence in Comes vs. Microsoft, an antitrust class-action suit, and was submitted as evidence in that case on January 16, 2007.

Importing video into Movie Maker 2 is quite easy, mostly because the XP operating system already supports digital camcorder capture. Simply connect your camcorder via a firewire cable, turn it on, and Windows XP will automatically detect it and bring up the capture window. Then, it’s just a matter of choosing your capture format. For high-quality video editing, this means either uncompressed DV-AVI or the new WMP9 compression. This WMP9 compression is excellent, and yields video that is almost as good as DV-AVI, but at a tiny fraction of hard drive space. You can capture manually, or have Movie Maker rewind and capture your entire tape. If you like, the program will automatically split your video into individual scene clips.