Windows Movie Maker Help

[Tekster]

ponygirl, I know you do a lot of movie free sites lately, do you prefer 15 or 20 sec clips?

[ponygirl]

Originally Posted by TekAngel

I think I figured out what I did, when I loaded the movie, I had the create clips for video files checked. I started over and now I have one whole movie showing up.

What do I do now? I drag the movie to the timeline and then what?

yep, drag the movie down to the bottom timeline. Basically, here's what I do with full movies:

once I have a rough idea where I'm taking a clip from, I zoom out far enough so I can cut a rough clip, about 1 minute for a 20-30 sec clip, just makes it easier to handle. Then I zoom in all the way in to do the final cuts. If you mouseover the beginning and end of the movie in the timeline, your cursor will change to a double sided red arrow. Drag this arrow to the spot where you want to cut the movie.
I find when you're cutting from the beginning of the movie in (left to right), it isn't very easy to cut beyond what you can actually see in the timeline, so that's why I zoom out for a rough clip, then fine tune it. When you're cutting from the end back (right to left), it's a lot easier. That may not make much sense, but it will once you start playing around with it

Once you have the clip cut, click File > Save Movie File. This opens up a dialogue box for you to choose your settings.
Choose My computer for the movie location, then Next
Enter the name of the clip (eg: sponsormovie3-clip1), and where you want to save it, then Next

The next box is the quality. You'll probably want to compress the clip, so if you only have one choice showing on this screen (it will be 'best quality for playback on my computer'), click the 'show more choices' link. Then choose 'Best fit to file size' and you can control the quality. For a 20-30 sec clip, I usually go to 2mb.

After you set that, click Next, and it will save the clip to the place you specified.

Then I go back, delete the clip from the storyboard, drag the full movie back in again and make my second clip, then repeat all the steps until you have all the clips you want.

One thing I learned was to take the screenshot of the clip just after saving it, I used to forget that one and have to import the clip to take the screenshot. Unfortunately that makes a shitty screenshot because you've already compressed the video. So now after I save the clip but before deleting it, I grab the screenshot - there's a camera icon just under the viewing screen, click that and it will grab whatever scene is showing on the viewer.

Someone else may have some different ways to do it, but I've been doing this for almost every movie freesite I do and it works great for me. Gives the clips a bit of individuality rather than just grabbing from the hosted galleries.

Originally Posted by TekAngel

ponygirl, I know you do a lot of movie free sites lately, do you prefer 15 or 20 sec clips?

I'm leaning towards 20 second clips, because I'm really particular about the beginning and ending of my clips, and a lot of times it doesn't fit into 15 seconds. The last one I did ended up with 3 30ish second clips on each gallery for just that reason. Plus I'm starting to find anything less than 20 seconds annoying because they're so short, but I guess that's the tease factor lol. No offense to everyone who uses 10-12 second clips

whew, that's the most I've talked in a long time