Before You Begin  81 Preview Your Final Movie 82 About Video Output Hardware
See Also  84 About Sharing Video with Others
Although your project can consist of many video and audio files, your final saved movie is a single file. Movie Maker combines all of the movie's video, sound, transitions, titles, and credits into the movie file. The source location of all the project files is no longer tied to anything in the movie file. In other words, you do not need to worry about moving or renaming any content that went into the movie, because moving or renaming source content files has no effect on the final saved movie's playback. Everything the movie needs is stored in the movie file. The movie file can be quite large, depending on the quality of the movie file. Movie Maker saves your movie using a variety of qualities. The quality is primarily determined by these factors: -
Bit rate ” The number of informational bits played in a second during the movie's playback. The higher the bit rate, the better your movie looks. KEY TERM  | Bits ” Small data values that, when combined, describe the sound and video of your movie. |
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Display size ” The size, in pixels , of your movie's playback screen size. The display size is given as the number of pixels wide and the number of pixels tall your movie comprises. The more pixels used, the better your movie looks at larger sizes. KEY TERM | | Pixel ” Stands for picture element , and is the smallest dot available on a monitor. |
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Aspect ratio ” The relation of the width to the height of your movie's playback. On playback devices that do not offer a wide screen, such as the PocketPC, your movie requires a different aspect ratio from a larger device designed for movies such as a high-definition television. An aspect ration of 16:9 means the movie's width-to-height ratio is 16-to-9, so the width is almost twice the length of the movie's height. -
Frames per second ” The number of movie frames that will play back per second. The higher the number of frames that play each second, the smoother and better your movie will play back. Although it supports 18 output qualities, Movie Maker is still surprisingly limited on the kind of movie files it can create. Movie Maker supports only the following two movie file formats: -
WMV ” The Windows Media Video format playable by the Windows Media Player and also by some non-Microsoft video playback programs and hardware. -
AVI ” The Audio-Video Interleave format required by digital video cameras you send your movie to and is playable by virtually all video playback programs available today. Of the 18 movie-saving resolutions Movie Maker offers, 17 are different resolutions and qualities of the WMV format, and one is the AVI format. Obviously, as Microsoft is the creator of Movie Maker, it's biased toward favoring its own file format, the WMV file format used by Windows Media Player. The WMV format compresses video files well while maintaining high quality. Unfortunately, WMV is not a standard recognized by all other video- related software, notably most DVD burner programs on the market today. KEY TERM | | DVD burner programs ” A program you need, in addition to Movie Maker, that will write your movie to a DVD so the movie is playable on a DVD player. |
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