Chapter 4. Getting Content into Movie Maker

IN THIS CHAPTER:

17 About Collections, Contents, and Projects

18 Start a Movie Maker Project

19 About Your Project's Content

20 Capture Video into Movie Maker

21 Import Video into Movie Maker

22 Import Still Pictures into Movie Maker

23 About Finding Video Content on the Web

24 Watch Your Video in the Monitor

25 Step Through Your Video One Frame at a Time

Understanding how Movie Maker's windows relate is the first step in producing videos quickly and easily with Movie Maker. Before you can produce a movie in Movie Maker, you must transfer your video and audio content to Movie Maker. Once there, you arrange the clips, add transitions, special effects, added audio (such as you might do for narration), and trim portions of the video to fit within your required playing time length.

Movie Maker supports several ways to import content into your video project. Your project does not even have to be a video; you can turn your imported audio and still photos into a slide show. To make your slide show more interesting, you can add narration and even specify how you want one slide to transition to another.

TIP

You can insert still pictures between two video clips. The pictures will display as long as you have set their duration to appear ( see 39 Set a Picture Clip's Duration ). Your movie's soundtrack can continue playing during the picture's display.

Movie Maker is simple to use, but part of its simplicity requires that you understand the workflow from raw video footage or pictures (or both) to your final movie.