Planning a Movie Maker Project

Movie Maker lets you combine video, audio, and image files to create movies you can show on your computer, e-mail to others, or place on a web page. You save the movie you create as a file, just as you would save a word processing or spreadsheet file, and you can play and view it at any time. However, movies and their accompanying files are larger than most other documents you create ”usually exceeding 5 MB. Before you begin, it's a good idea to plan your content.

Decide the purpose of the movie

Your movie might be a promotional piece or catalog for business use, or a vacation movie to share with family and friends . Your purpose determines the subject, type, and quality of the source material , which is the video and audio material you will use.

Determine how to share the movie with others

You might want to show your movie on a computer projection screen at a meeting, send it as an attachment in an e-mail message, or place it on a web site. When you place a movie on a web site, viewers might download it, which means to transfer it to their computers and store it for future viewing. If your movie is very long or has many high-quality images, the movie file will be large and will take a long time to download.

Choose source material

If you have a digital video or digital web camera, you can record or capture digital images directly into Movie Maker on your computer. To use existing video or audio segments, called clips , you must import them, or bring them into, Movie Maker. You can also import clips from videotape, but your computer must have a video capture card to convert clips from analog to digital format. You can start the System Information accessory on the System Tools submenu to determine whether you have a video capture card installed on your computer.

Sketch the movie

Before putting your movie together in Movie Maker, it's important to make a sketch of your movie that shows the order of the audio and video components . What audio clips do you want to play with what video clips?

Review the process used to create a movie

First, you bring clips of source material into a Movie Maker project file. A project file , which is the working copy of your movie, is a Movie Maker document with the file name extension .mswmm. You then use the project file to do the following: set the order of your movie segments; trim (delete) portions of clips you don't want to use; specify how clips display from one to the next , called transitions ; add a video special effect to clips; add titles and credits to the beginning and end of the movie or individual clips; and, lastly, preview your work. Finally, you save your project file as a movie with the file name extension .wmv and display the completed movie using the Windows Media Player program.



Show Me Microsoft Windows XP
Show Me Microsoft Windows XP (2nd Edition)
ISBN: 0789733366
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2002
Pages: 391

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