Windows Movie Maker

Windows Movie Maker

Tutorial

The Program

Windows Movie Maker is a FREE program that comes with Windows.

With Movie Maker, you can create, edit, and share your movies right on your computer with a few simple drag-and-drops.

You can save your movie to your computer, your school account or a flash drive.

Pictures

Pictures in Movie Maker are graphics that don't move. They can be photographs, drawings, maps, or clip art. The first step for learning Movie Maker is to bring pictures into your project.

Pictures .. contd.Before you start taking graphics from the internet, you must consider copyright laws.

This is a HUGE issue that is beyond the scope of this curriculum web. Give credit and/or get permission from person who owns or created the image.

Before you can import pictures into your project, they must be either on the hard drive of your computer or in your folder on the server. If you already have some, you can use them. Otherwise you can either find your own on the internet. You will need at least four pictures, and at least one video.

Gathering Pictures

Importing Pictures

Now that you have graphics ready, look at Movie Maker. There is a column on the left side called 'Movie Tasks.' There, under 'Capture Video', click 'Import Pictures.' Navigate to the folder in which you saved your graphics, and select all of the pictures.Click 'Import' to bring them into the program.

Now you see the pictures in the middle of the screen in a section called 'Collections.' Your next step is to drag the pictures onto the timeline in the order you want them in your movie. First, make sure your program is in 'Timeline' view. The bottom section of your screen should look like this:

If the bottom of your screen looks like this, click on 'Show Timeline'

Now, click on pictures and drag them down to the timeline.

If you would like to see the movie so far, you can click on the Play button on the small player on the right side of the screen. Notice that each picture plays for 5 seconds by default.

You can change that to almost any amount of time if you want to. To make a picture stay up for more or less than five seconds, click on the movie in the timeline. Move your mouse to the right side of the picture. When the cursor turns into a red two-way arrow, click and drag the picture to the right to make it last longer, or to the left to make it last for less time. Note that you must change the duration by clicking on the right border of the picture, not the left.

Saving your work

You need to save your work often in Movie Maker! You should always save often in any program, but Movie Maker freezes more often than the average program. So as a rule of thumb, every time you feel pleased with what you have done, click the save icon.

Don't lose your work!

When you save by clicking the save icon or by clicking 'File-Save,' you will save your project as a Movie Maker file. That means you can still edit it in Movie Maker, but you can't use it in any other program.

VideoVideo is imported in much the same way as still pictures. Click on 'Import video' in the Capture Video section of the Movie Tasks pane. If your video is very long, it may be divided into several parts by Movie Maker. If you want the entire video in the project, drag each part, in the order it appears, into your project.

VideoYou can shorten a video clip by dragging it from the left to trim off the beginning, or from the right to trim off the end. If your video has audio attached to it, it will show up in the 'audio' row under the picture on the timeline (There should be two audio rows. If you only see one, click on the + next to the word 'Video' to the left of the timeline.)