Basic Knowledge: Windows Movie Maker

Posted by cindyhuan on April 19th, 2013

Windows Movie Maker is the video editing program that is included with Windows XP. Windows Movie Maker allows you to quickly build a personalized movie that incorporates video, still images, background music, and narration. This movie can be customized further by adding titles, transitions, and video effects. Windows Movie Maker was designed to be easy to use even if you don't have any experience with video editing. Windows Movie Maker is kind of powerful yet easy-to-use video editor, because of which it is favored by global users.

Knowledge about Windows Movie Maker:

Supported Input Formats
Video Formats: asf, avi, wmv
Movie Formats: MPEG1, mpeg, mpg, m1v, mp2
Audio Formats: mp3, wav, snd, au, aif, aifc, aiff
Windows Media Video File: asf, wm, wma, wmv

From what has been discussed above, we can infer that the supported formats of Windows Movie Maker are limited, which means not all videos are editable by it. Although you can play a file in Microsoft Windows Media Player, you may not be able to import the file into Windows Movie Maker even though this article lists that kind of file. You may not be able to import the file if the codec that was used to encode the audio or video is not a codec that is included with Windows. In that case, you may be able to re-encode the video or audio by using Windows Media Encoder, and then import the video or audio.

when we try to make a homemade movie, we probably will import the source videos from DVD discs or footages from camcorders except downloading from the Internet. However, as has been mentioned above, WMM does not support DVD videos, so if you want to import a DVD to Windows Movie Maker, you need to use a third-partyDVD to Windows Movie Maker Converter to help. By doing so, the DVD videos will be ripped down from the disc and be converted to WMM-accepted formats so that you can edit them on it. Recommended program: Doremisoft DVD Converter.

As to the camcorder footages like MOV videos, you should choose this Video Converter to convert MOV to Windows Movie Maker so as to get the source video runs at the right form. Besides, this converter can also convert camcorder footages to other video editor in addition to WMM. For example, you can use the converter to convert GoPro Hero 3 to Premiere with high efficiency and with no quality loss.

OK, that's all the contents about this topic today. Have fun!