68 Make Your Movie Look Vintage

Before You Begin

65 Add a Special Effect to a Clip

66 Manage and Delete Special Effects

See Also

70 Convert from Color to Black and White

Movie Maker provides three special effects that age your movie to make it look old, older, and very old. These three effects produce the following results:

• Film Age, Old ” Turns your clip grainy, as though it's been played a few too many times in the movie theater.

• Film Age, Older ” Adds a deteriorating effect to the clip to make it look old and almost damaged. The clip jumps as it plays and appears to skip frames now and then.

• Film Age, Oldest ” Turns the clip into fuzzy, black-and-white aged footage that seems to have come from the earliest days of film.

TIP

Movie Maker will not change the audio when you apply an aging special effect to a clip. You should either mute the clip's volume during the aged playback or use a bad recording of your audio so the audio doesn't belie the film's aged effect. You can record your audio file onto a cheap tape recorder and then record back to your computer via the computer's microphone to help reduce the audio's quality.

Consider using the aging special effects when you film dream sequences of long ago times, or perhaps when you provide a flashback from the current time period. As with any special effect, you can overdo the aged look ”but when you need to add years to your video's action, there is hardly a better way to do so than by applying these Film Age special effects.

1. Select Tools, Video Effects
   
   Display the available video effects by selecting Video Effects from the Tools menu. The special effects will appear in the Contents pane.
   
   
2. Scroll to Film Age, Older
   
   Locate one of the three aging effects, such as Film Age, Older , by scrolling your Contents pane until you see the aging effects.
   
   
3. Double-Click the Thumbnail Image
   
   Double-click the aging effect's thumbnail image to see how the effect plays on your monitor. If you want more aging or less, select one of the other Film Age effects.
   
   
4. Drag to Clip
   
   Drag the aging special effect thumbnail image to the clip to which you want to apply the effect. Notice the Video Effect icon that now appears on the clip. Click Play to review the effect on the clip.