A newbie tries his hand at video editing... and does alright (Windows Movie Maker)

Member Name: Midrange

Product:	Windows Movie Maker
Date:	24/08/09 (20 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Does the job. Easy to get to grips with.

Disadvantages: Very limited functionality and difficult to control at times

For our first wedding anniversary, I tried my hand at movie making as a surprise for my wife. I had only briefly dabbled in Windows Movie Maker before starting this project so I gave myself 5 days to complete it. I spent over 10 hours making the video and learnt a lot from the experience.

Windows Movie Maker is, in my opinion, the perfect tool for creating a basic slideshow of photographs and perhaps the odd movie clip. Users can add titles, captions and credits with relative ease. There is also room for 1 audio track (be it narration, music or audio from your video clips). Videos can be relatively crudely clipped and roughly 25 effects can be applied to each clip.

After just a few hours I was disappointed with how very limited the program is. It was extremely difficult to reposition text on the screen and the video clipping feature was unnecessarily unfunctional - to explain - the program informs you of the duration of each clip to the nearest 10th of a millisecond yet you cannot fine tune the duration without dragging the mouse about - which is inaccurate. There are basic ways around this, but if you want spot on timing you just have mess around until you're happy.

The Audio track was also frustratingly limited. I had to do all my editing (voice overs, transitions between songs etc.) in Audacity (an excellent and free Audio editing program available online).

In it's favour, WMM does have a decent array of transitions - such as the classic fade to black, the exciting "Shatter" and the hopelessly romantic "Heart Silouette" fade. Again, all the fine tuning of transition duration has to be done with the mouse - there's no way to just type in "Transition Length: 0.30 seconds".

I was pleased with what I was able to do with the program, but as a complete newbie to film-making, I realised quickly just how limited it is. It takes just a little too long to do fairly simple tasks but the end results are reliable.

Annoyingly, WMM crashed about 10 times whilst I was working on my project. Fortunately I was schooled well in computing and saved my work regularly.

It was definitely worth the work. My wife was delighted with the finished product, which I posted on Facebook for her and friends and family to watch. We're now working on a project together for our nephew's first birthday - let's hope my experience and my wife's patience will see this one through without too many hitches!

Summary: Very adaquate and basic video editing program. Prepare for some frustration!

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