Windows Movie Maker... it's no iMovie

My group decided to look at Windows Movie Maker and iMovie partly they seem to be the most used video editing applications in education and partly because one of our readings this week specifically mentioned them as being two of the best free video editing options available. Since I have already used iMovie many times, I decided to review and evaluate Movie Maker so that I could get exposed to a different program. Windows Movie Maker comes free with PC’s that use Microsoft Windows XP or Vista or can be downloaded for free from the Microsoft website. It cannot be used with Windows 7 that comes with its own video editor called Windows Live MovieMaker . For a free video editing software, Windows Movie Maker has some great basic functions, however, its “bells and whistles” are few and there are some drawbacks to the interface that it uses. Importing Options for importing are video straight from your video camera, video from a file on your computer, pictures or audio. Video formats that can be imported are limited to .asf, .avi, .dvr-ms, .m1v, .mp2, .mp2v, .mpe, .mpeg, .mpg, .mpv2, .wm, and .wmv. This means that MP4s and .mov files will need to be converted before they can be used in the software. Editing Once you have added your media to your project, adding clips to your movie is as easy as dragging and dropping. Clips can be viewed in the preview screen at the right as they are edited. Movie Maker has several effects and transitions that you can add to customize your video. The one drawback that I found as I was adding effects to my video is that they are added to entire clips. The only way to use an effect for only part of a clip requires splitting the clip into two clips. The same is true for cutting a clip. You can cut the beginning or end of a clip, but to cut material from the middle of a clip you need to split the clip. This can get cumbersome if you have several internal clips to make. You can also add titles and credits to your video as well. For each addition you can choose the font, color and effect of your title. You can also add music or audio files to your movie as well. However, you can only control volume for the entire length of the audio or music file. There is a fade in or fade out option, but other than that, you are stuck with one level of sound for the entire selection. Unlike programs like iMovie, however there are no royalty free music or sound effect options included in the software. Publishing There are four publishing options with Windows Movie Maker. Publishing to your computer, recording to a recordable CD, sending it in an email or sending it to your digital video camera. There is no way to record a DVD in the software. A separate program will need to be used to create a DVD. You have two formats that you can publish your file in, AVI and WMV. Overall, considering that students can easily obtain it for free and that it has all of the basic editing tools needed for most student projects, Movie Maker is a good choice for classroom use. However, I would recommend that if iMovie is available at your school that it be considered. It is a program that I have used extensively in my classes. It has all of the features of Movie Maker but it also includes an easier interface for trimming and editing clips, as well as more title choices and royalty free music and sound effects. We are luck at our school to have access to both PCs and a mac laptop lab so I think that if I have my students make their own videos, I am going to use iMovie myself. Microsoft. (2010, 09 05). Create home movies with windows movie maker. Retrieved 09 05, 2010, from http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/moviemaker/default.mspx