So you can begin editing. It might be the first time you're attempting to edit your own video. But no need to worry, because Windows Movie Maker makes it easy and it's free. A lot of people think they need to buy software to make a home video, but they already have a program on their computer and that's Windows Movie Maker, and it comes with every copy of Windows. And it can do everything they need for actually editing their home videos from start to finish, taking it from their camera, editing it, putting all the special effects on it and then putting it out to either the Web or CD, playing it off their computer, whatever they need, Windows Movie Maker can probably do it.
The best way for folks to find Windows Movie Maker is to go to the Start menu and to All Programs and most of the time it will already be in that first menu layer. If it's not, then the best way to find it is to go to Accessories and it will probably be waiting for them there. If they don't have Windows Movie Maker already installed on their computer they can always find it at the Microsoft website.
If you don't want to capture the entire tape you'll find it helpful to keep track of your time code. Time code is the exact address or location on a tape for a specific image. So if you know you want to capture the first five minutes of your tape, the time code will be 00002000500. This will really come in handy when you shoot shots throughout the tape to capture and you won't have to fast forward and rewind through tons of footage.
You'll know exactly where your selected shots are. After you've got the program started, you'll see Windows Movie Maker has laid out all of the order of how you get the video into your computer step step-by-step listed for you. So the very first option is capture from video device. Before you do that, you want to make sure that your camera is turned on and that you've got the right cable hooked up. For us, this is a DV cable. Other ways you can get video into your camera to your computer is through USB cable or through an S video cable. You'll just have to see what's on your camera to see what you've got.
After you've got it connected and turned on, then you'll click on capture from video device. This wizard is going to ask you what do you want to call this. Now it's going to ask you what quality do you want this. For almost anything you do, go ahead and pick best quality. Even if you don't think you'll need it, you may want better quality later. Then you click next and you have two options. You can either capture the entire tape automatically so it will take it from start to finish, or if you don't want everything, click on capture parts of the tape manually.
And make sure when you capture it you have show preview during capture so you can see what you've actually got going into your computer. On the next screen this wizard is what you control your camera with. It's got controls laid out just like VCR remote. What you'll do is start by hitting play. When you find the place you want to start you can go ahead and just hit start capture. As you can see, as it takes off it will show you how much time you've recorded but not only that how large the file size is going to be.
And, remember, every drive is going to have limited space. So keep an eye on how much space you're using and also how much space is actually available on your drive. If you're going to be editing a lot of video, then it's a good idea to go ahead and buy an external hard drive to store all your videos on. Video files can get really big really fast. Once you've captured all the video you want then woins will display what it calls a collection and it will name you whatever you called your first file. If you want to add something like music to that, then there's that option for pictures, import, audio or music.
So let's click on that. Microsoft already has a free creativity kit available on line. Just go to Microsoft's website and you can download it. What that will do is it has a number of free music clips, and I'm going to import one right now. That will show up in the collection that we had with our video. So everything that we bring in that we want to use, whether it be a still photo, a movie, music, it's all going to show up in this collections window.
To add that, you can just simply right click on it and say: Add to timeline. And it will start adding that in. If it's your first time to use Movie Maker, then you'll probably want to use the storyboard view. That makes it really easy. You just click on the video that you want, and you can drag it to each slot in the storyboard so you can see which clip of video you've got in order. But if you want to add audio or titles or special effects, then you want to click on the button that says show timeline.
And what that's going to show us is several different rows of information. And the first one is always going to be video. The second row is going to be audio and music. And the third row will be titles and credits and overlays. So you can see that we put our first home video movie video on the timeline in this first clip I kept the tape capturing a little too long so I got a shot I didn't want. You don't have to keep that in your video.
If you simply click on that clip on your timeline, and then position your mouse right on the edge of it, you'll see it turns into double arrowed line. Click and hold that and it will let you drag to the left or to the right and trim off any part of the video that you don't want. So by using that, you can take away shots that you didn't want in the first place. Say you've got a part of your video you don't want to include. That's pretty easy to take out. If you position the cursor on the timeline nover the spot that you want to take out, there's a button that says split the clip into two clips at the current frame.
That's the option we want to use. You click on that, at the place where you have your timeline cursor, it will split that clip into two. Now you can move to the spot after the part you want to take out. And hit split clips again. Now you have three different clips. And click on the middle one, and then you can just right click and delete the part that you don't want and Movie Maker will automatically pull everything back together to where it's seamless and the clips you want to keep.
Movie Maker makes it really easy to add special effects. They've already got some that are premade for you. If you click on viewed video transitions now you'll see a whole list of different types of transitions of how to get from one piece of video to the next, and they're going to be things you've seen on television and a few you even haven't. If we click on the one that looks like a heart it will show you a preview what that transition is going to look like on two pieces of sample video.
To add that, the easy way is to go back to your storyboard mode and click and drag that icon to the space, there's a box right between each video clip. And when you let it go, it will put that transition between the video clips. Once you hit play you can see a sample of what it looks like over your video. If you don't like it, well, that's easy, you just click on another transition, drag it into place until you find one that looks the way you want.
Movie Maker also has a lot of special effects that you can add to your video clips between transitions. If you click right below show collections there's an option called view video effects. That's what we want to do. Now you can see a number of different very slick looking effects that you can add to your video. And in the same way that we put a transition on, you're just going to click and drag and instead of going to a transition box, you'll see that each piece of video has a little box with a star. That's where you put your effects.
If your video has an effect, that star will be blue. And you can look at it. If it doesn't have an effect then that box will be grayed out. So any one of these that you want to add you just click and drag, and it will add that to each of those. And then you can go back and hit play and see what those video effects did. Right below video transitions, you'll see an option that says make title or credits. Click on that and it will give you several options.
If you want to add a title at the beginning of the movie, if you want to add it over a clip, if you want to add credits at the end. Let's add a title at the beginning. Now you see two boxes. What this is you'll type in the text that you want and Movie Maker will automatically put a preview of that over the clip of your movie. If you're happy with it, then you can say I'm done, add this title to my movie. Now we can hit play and see how that looks.
Video editing is truly an art. Professionals spend hours and even months on end to create entertainment we all enjoy. With this in mind, it may take a few days to complete your first edit. The wizards in Windows Movie Maker help guide you through the process and the more you use the program the more comfortable you'll be. When you're happy with the way your video looks and you've finished all the different edits and effects then you have several options for how you want to save the movie, if you want to play it back off your computer or play in a DVD player or give it to someone on a CD or want to e-mail it to them or put it on the Web.
Movie Maker has options for all of these that are automated. So in the third category is called Finish Movie. Before you do anything else, you'll want to save the movie to your computer. So let's do that first. Even though you've already named all the video clips in the movie, Windows is going to ask you what do you want to name this movie. And it will also ask you where do you want to save this. You want to put it somewhere where you can find easily. A good idea would be in My Videos folder in My Documents folder.
Now it will ask you for several different options. Probably your best bet is always save best quality for play back on my computer, that way you've got a high resolution copy that you can then reencode later to a lower resolution that you could e-mail or burn to DVD. First let's choose best quality. We'll save one that way. We'll click on next.
And Windows will start processing all the effects and transitions and the different video clips and music that you've got in there, and be patient because if you've got a lot of video clips, this is going to take a little while. Once the movie is finished processing, then you're going to see an option that says play movie when I click finish.
It's a good idea, just because you want to make sure if you missed something when you're previewing it, then you can catch it now, make the correction. Click finish, and Windows Media Player will pop up a copy of your movie and play back in real time with all your effects. When you tell Windows Movie Maker that you want to send the movie by e-mail, it's going to do something called compression.
Compressing the video means it reduces the file size but keeps the quality as good as it possibly can. So even though this won't be as crisp and clean as you'd find on a DVD player, it's still going to be a good enough quality that they're going to enjoy seeing the movie when they pull it up on their e-mail. Once Windows has compressed the movie, it will give you the options of either playing the movie now, which is still a good idea, or just saving a copy of the movie on to your computer.
Once you play back the movie and you're happy with it, save it to your computer and then you can e-mail it by just attaching it to an e-mail in whatever program you use. One of the options is save to CD. If you choose that option, it probably means you're going to play this video back off of another computer's CD player, not a DVD player that you'd find on your home theater system. For more information about Windows Movie Maker and the creativity kit with free music and sound effects, please visit this link.
The first time you edit a video it's going to be really daunting. It's probably going to take you a while. There is a learning curve. But Windows Movie Maker makes it a lot easier in that it will take you step-by-step through the process. And as you get more comfortable with it, you can start adding more options and taking more creative pieces and adding that to the puzzle, if you want to add music, if you want to add graphics, if you want to add voice narration, you can do all those things, and it's really your blank canvas to paint on.
