Windows Live Movie Maker : Windows Movie Maker – A Free and Versatile Program

By Don Poulton , published on September 13, 2009 at 9:40 PM
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 A decade ago, getting together to view vacation pictures and movies with family and friends usually meant dragging out the projector and subjecting your audience to an often boring set of slides or movies appearing one after another on the screen. Digital photography and videography, in its simplest form, can mean more of the same kind of boredom. Preventing that boredom is all in the way your shots and movies are presented. Microsoft’s free new application, Windows Live Movie Maker for Windows 7 (WLMM), enables anyone to create high-quality audio/visual (A/V) slide shows and movies that entertain your audience in a manner formerly available to only those who purchased expensive electronic equipment, such as dual-projector dissolve units and audio programmers. WLMM was available in beta form earlier this year; Microsoft released its final version recently (August 2009) with a significantly expanded feature set.

Many video editing programs such as CyberLink PowerDirector for videos or ProShow Gold for slide shows or videos are available for online download. However, nearly all of these are pricey, costing anywhere from $19.99 to several hundred dollars. The free programs that are available such as Pazera Free MP4 to AVI Converter do not offer anywhere near the same set of features as WLMM; in particular, none of them offer the capability of creating A/V shows from still images. 

You can install WLMM on a computer running either Windows Vista or Windows 7, but Windows XP and older operating systems do not support WLMM.
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Comments
Anonymous 09/14/2009 4:54 PM
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"The free programs that are available such as Pazera Free MP4 to AVI Converter"

What? Apples and Oranges my man. Pazera isn't an editing program, it's just a converter. Maybe something like Wax would be a better comparison.

barryegerber 09/14/2009 7:27 PM
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I strongly urge against simply downloading Windows Live programs without first considering what each does. In my experience, for example, Windows Live Mail insinuates itself into Outlook, rendering it much more difficult to use. I have no idea what WLMM might do to other programs on your computer, but freeware user beware.

rcmaniac25 09/14/2009 10:27 PM
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I havn't noticed any other programs changing after installing WLMM. I'm just glad that it has the photo to video piece. I used MS PhotoStory but they stopped working on it. They basically took WMM added PhotoStory and changed the UI. Either way I'm happy.

Shadow703793 09/15/2009 10:29 PM
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I guess it would be OK for some basic stuff. But for any thing serious, you need some heavy duty software.

randomizer 09/16/2009 7:48 AM
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There is also Movie Maker 2.6 which is much more like the old XP one but made for Vista/Win 7. It is a little (emphasis on "little") more functional than this one I believe.

chriskrum 09/16/2009 11:25 PM
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I've been editing movies for decades, starting on a flatbed with a razor blade and building my own NLE system with a massive 4 gig scsi drive in the early nineties. The capabilities that pure amateurs have access to now are simply stunning. Windows Live Movie Maker and the earlier Movie Maker are quite capable programs--pretty much all one needs for home video. Frankly, I think too many people buy (or acquire) professional and semi-professional products when they have no need and little clue how to use them.

randomizer 09/17/2009 2:16 AM
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The biggest problem with Movie Maker is not its editing capabilities, but with it's inflexible encoder. According to this article it can only do WMV, and I know the old Movie Maker could also do DV, but the lack of fine-tuned bitrate and pixel aspect ratio settings makes it painful to use sometimes. It is certainly no good for widescreen youtube videos, as the video is always converted to anamorphic widescreen with non-square pixels, whereas youtube can only deal with square pixels.

aboczsr 09/24/2009 4:25 PM
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what's up with the last page of this article? It appears to be non-reachable.

videodood 09/24/2009 5:10 PM
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I found the new Windows Movie Maker for Windows 7 very disappointing. I work with HD and thought it would be a snap. But Movie Maker gives you but one option: download the entire HD 1 hour long tape. I'm not gonna do that. So on HD capture it fails. Then I checked out the effects and you can count them all on your fingers! What happened? Way back in XP days I saw dozens of cool effects now there's only 7 or something.

While I'm happy it can deal with HD it's disappointing the limited capture capability.

pearl298 09/24/2009 6:39 PM
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Interesting, it won't work under XP but it does work fine under Ubuntu/Linux!

Of course Linux already has several really first class video making apps.

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