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Advanced Movie Maker 2.0 Techniques

  • Apr 29, 2005
Action! Got the itch to direct your own movie? With Matthew David, you get down and dirty under the hood of Movie Maker 2. You will use many of the advanced features that will take your video and make you an Oscar contender. Well, almost.
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In my last article I introduced Microsoft's Movie Maker 2.0 for Windows XP. In this article, I'll to dig a bit deeper into the product and demonstrate some of the more advanced features you can leverage when building your movies.

You'll learn how to organize your content more effectively, choosing when to switch between the Storyboard and the Timeline, enhancing video with visual Video Effects, controlling audio, and learning to publish a movie.

There's a lot to do, so let's get cracking.

Organizing Content

When you work on a movie, the first thing you need is material. For Movie Maker, it means video, digital photos, and audio. Which camera you use depends on how your images are stored on your hard drive. Wherever your images and video are, you want to bring them all into Movie Maker's Collections folder.

TIP

A word to the wise: the Collections folder will pull all of the images into a singles folder. Nice one. You can then drag in any music tracks or audio files (such as WAV or MP3 files) to do the same. The royal pain will come when you want to add movie clips. If you are like me, you probably take a lot of video in different series of shots on your camera before transferring to your computer. When you drag several video files to your Collections folder, Movie Maker separates all the video files into their own named folder. You can resolve this by dragging the video clips back into a single folder.

Movie Maker also splits large video files into logical chunks. Unfortunately, Movie Maker's logic isn't really "logical:" The breaks appear haphazard. Watch out for this—It can help and it can hurt.

If you are creating small movies, collect all your content together in one Collection, which makes it easier to find the files later. However, if you have a lot of content, I recommend that you create several Collections. Create a naming scheme. For instance, if you are taking the video, movies, taped interviews, and music to "Tony and Tina's Wedding," split up the collections as follows:

  • Video_TonyTina
  • Audio_TonyTina
  • Images_TonyTina

I am a bit of a programmer, which is why the underlines are there (old habits die hard), but you do not need to use them. Separating the folders under consistent names allows you to quickly find your digital media and gives you more time to create.

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