Chapter 6. Working with Movie Maker Clips

IN THIS CHAPTER:

33 Watch a Clip

34 Display a Clip's Properties

35 About the Timeline and Storyboard

36 Place a Clip on the Timeline

37 Zoom a Timeline Clip

38 Clear the Timeline

39 Set a Picture Clip's Duration

40 Repeat a Clip

41 Take a Picture from a Clip

42 Split a Clip into Multiple Clips

43 Combine Multiple Clips into One

44 Set Trim Points

45 Nudge a Clip to Adjust Its Start Time

As you learned in the previous chapter, clips are small sections of video you use to produce your final video production. You can trim, merge, and arrange clips so that they appear in the order and within the timeframe you require. The better your clip-editing skills become, the more professional your resulting videos will look.

Having several clips to work with gives you flexibility when producing the final video. If you start with just one long clip, you will spend lots of time editing it to eliminate unnecessary video. If you begin with several smaller clips, you have more flexibility ”you can more easily arrange the smaller clips, edit them more quickly than longer clips, and insert and delete sections of your video with less effort.

Suppose you have an hour of raw footage video from your parents' anniversary bash and you want to turn that into a 20-minute commemorative video of the evening's highlights. When you import the video into Movie Maker, instead of saving the video as one hour -long stream, Movie Maker cuts the video into multiple clips ”provided that the Create clips for video files option in the Import File dialog box is selected ( see 21 Import Video into Movie Maker ). Movie Maker does not create clips from picture files you import. Some clips might only last a couple of seconds, and others might span a minute or more. Movie Maker separates video into clips when it senses scene changes or major camera differences.

Now that you have an assortment of numerous , small clips, you can more easily put together a video montage your parents will cherish.