Adding Finishing Touches to Your Movie

Now it's time to commit your movie to posterity, or at least to your hard disk. Movie Maker gives you a few options in this area. In this section, we concentrate on saving the movie to the local computer's hard disk and then sharing it with all the computers on your home network. However, after you save your movie, you can also send it as an email attachment, share it on the Web, save it to a CD, or even send it back in final form to your camcorder.

Note

Sending video clips via email is an option for only very short clips. Any lengthy video clips will be large files that don't work well as email attachments.

To save a movie to your computer, follow these steps:

1.	In Movie Maker, under Finish Movie, click Save to My Computer. The Saved Movie File page appears (see Figure 6.13). Figure 6.13. Saving your movie.
2.	Enter a filename for your movie and choose a folder in which to save your movie. Then click Next. The Movie Setting page appears.
3.	Click Next. The Completing the Save Movie Wizard page appears. Note Keep in mind that you can click the Show More Choices link on the Save Movie Wizard page to choose other settings for your saved movie file. Refer to the "Capture Considerations" section, earlier in this chapter, for more information.
4.	Click Finish to complete the wizard.

Assuming that you accepted the default choices, your movie begins to play in Windows Media Player. From Chapter 3, "Project 2: Sharing Files, Printers, and Other Stuff on Your Network," you know how to share the folder where your videos are located. For other members of your home network to view your video work of art, they merely have to connect to the shared folder where you have placed the video file and double-click the file; Windows Media Player then begins to play the movie on that person's computer.