Guide to Windows Movie Maker Getting Movie Maker The latest version of Windows Movie Maker, released in 2016, is available from Microsoft for free at: http://www.windows-movie-maker.org/ Starting a Project When you open WMM, it will automatically start a project for you. Before you do anything, rename the project by choosing Save project as from the main menu, and save it where you want it to be (e.g., in My Documents). The Interface
Importing Video To import video, click the Add videos and photos button under the home menu. From there, find your video files. If you are importing from a camera, try browsing to your camera under Computer in the file browser. Then choose the file you want to import. Editing Select a video clip by clicking on it. You can drag and drop clips to rearrange their sequence. When you have a clip selected, you will see a new menu, Video Tools, appear up top. Here you will see options to split your clip, trim it, or change the speed. The Split tool will cut your clip in two at the point where your cursor is in the storyboard pane. This is really helpful for dividing up a long clip of footage. To delete a clip, simply select it and hit your Delete key. You can add transitions between clips by selecting a clip, then choosing one you like under the Animations menu. This will add the transition to the beginning of the selected clip. Adding Photos To add photos, you also use the Add videos and photos button. If you select your photo in the Storyboard, you ll see the Video Tools menu again. You can change the Duration of your photos; the default is 7 seconds. You can make your photos move by choosing from the Pan and zoom options under the Animations menu. Using Text You can add text in three ways, under the home menu. A Title adds text onto its own blank background, which is great to use for your opening title, and for pull quotes from your scholarly sources. If you want your text to show over top of the video or photo you have on screen, you want a Caption. For scrolling credits--these will automatically be placed at the end--choose Credits. Whenever you select a clip with text, you ll see a new menu up top: Text Tools. This gives you a ton of options to animate your text, change fonts and sizes, etc.
Adding Music & Narration Add music (surprise!) through the Add music button under the home menu. The dropdown on this button links to sources of free-to-use music such as Vimeo and Free Music Archive. Once you have added a music clip, it shows up as a green bar under your video clips. You can drag and drop these to move them just like video clips. You ll also see the Music Tools menu appear. In here, you can change the music volume, add fades, and split the track (where your cursor is). You can record a narration with the button. Hit the red button and start speaking into your computer s built-in mic. Try to record in a quiet place with no background noise. Emphasis At any point in your project where you have multiple media sources playing (e.g., video clip with background music and narration), you can choose to emphasize one source, such as your narration, by choosing one under the Project menu. Here are the options: Exporting your Final Video To export your final video to turn in or share, click the Save movie button under the Home menu. The default setting is good; or from the drop-down menu choose For computer.
How To Arrange The Clips On The Timeline When you import video clips or photos, they are automatically inserted into the timeline after the clip that you selected on the timeline. As you can see in the picture below, if you select the first image the newly added video clip is inserted between the clip 1 and clip 2. You can easily rearrange the order of the video clips by dragging and dropping them on the timeline. Accordingly, the surrounding videos will be shifted on the timeline. Note that Windows Movie Maker doesn't allow any "blank space" on the timeline every second of the timeline must be filled by a photo, video, transition or title card.
Likewise, when you remove a clip from the timeline, the surrounding clips shift to fill the gap left behind and shorten the overall length of your movie. You can remove clips by right clicking them and choosing Remove or by selecting them and pressing Delete on the keyboard. You can also cut, copy and paste the clips using the corresponding commands in the contextual menu, or by selecting a clip and pressing CTRL+X, CTRL+C or CTRL+V, respectively. An even faster way to duplicate clips is to hold CTRLwhile dragging and dropping a clip. An exact copy of the clip will be placed where you release the mouse, and the original clip will remain in place. How To Trim & Split Videos
In addition to reordering clips on the timeline, you can also trim or split them into separate clips. Both of these tools are on the Edit tab on the ribbon. If you want to split a clip, you need to position the play cursor at the point where you'd like to split it. To do this, click the long black vertical cursor and drag it into the middle of a clip. Or, you can click Play on the preview pane and hit Pause when you reach the point in the clip where you'd like to split it. Once you have the cursor positioned correctly, click Split. This creates two separate clips, which you can now rearrange, trim and apply effects to independently from one another.
There are two ways to trim video clips. The easiest way is to set the start point and end point. When you set the start point, Windows Movie Maker deletes the clip footage that precedes the cursor. When you set the end point, the clip footage after the cursor is removed. To set the start and end points, position the cursor as you did above and click Set start point or Set end point. Alternately, you can use the Trim tool, from the Edit tab on the ribbon. It is found in the Editing section. You can set the start point and end point either by dragging the sliders underneath the preview or by entering the times in manually. You can do multiple trims by clicking Set start point and Set end point. This updates the clip with the new start and end points, so you can trim it again. When you're finished, press Save trim.
If you make a mistake, you can press CTRL+Z to undo or delete the clip and re import the original and start over. Unfortunately, there is no easy way to join clips or combine clips in Windows Movie Maker. If you absolutely need this function, you can create a project with the clips you want to combine and export it as a.wmv and then import it back into your main project. How To Speed Up & Slow Down Videos If you want to change the speed of a clip, select it and choose a speed from the drop down menu next to Speed. This is found in the Edit tab on the ribbon, in the Adjust section.
Note that when you change the speed of a video clip, Windows Movie Maker removes the audio from it. This is because the audio's pitch will be affected by the change in speed. If you want to retain the audio, you can extract it using a program like Audacity or AoA Audio Extractor, but when you add it back in, it will be out of sync. How To Change The Volume Of A Video You can alter the volume of each video clip by selecting it and clicking Video volume button and dragging the slider. This button is found in the Edit tab on the ribbon, in the Audio section. You can also have the audio fade in or fade out at three different speeds: slow, medium and fast. Simply choose your fade in/fade out speed from the drop down menu in the Audio section from the Edit tab on the ribbon. Conclusion As you can see, editing videos in Windows Movie Maker isn't so difficult. These are just the main options that you can use in this application, but this video editor has a lot of other interesting features that aren't so difficult to use like animations, transitions, visual effects or audio effects.