Once you have finished editing your video project in Windows Movie Maker you are going to want to save and share it. Depending on how you would like to publish or distribute it you have a variety of different options available to you.
With the complete sequence created in Windows Movie Maker, go up and select the Tasks view right below the Task Bar. This is listed in the series of functions along side the Quick Save and Open functions. The Movie Tasks window will then open where the Collections were listed. In this new window, you need to go to
the third option: the one listed as Finish Movie.
The first of these options is to Save to Computer. When you select this you get an option to save to a space on your hard drive as a video file. You choose your preferred type for video playback, and it is then saved on your computer.
The second option is to burn your movie to a CD, and this works similarly to simply saving it to your computer. Insert a CD-R into your burner and you can burn it as a data file directly to the CD.
The next option is to send the movie as an email. To do this the program first saves the video on the computer, then gives you email log in options. First give your name so that the video has an author, then the email you are sending it to, then end with your own email information. From here the video is sent to the addressed recipient.
There is also an option for saving it to the Internet, which utilizes the video saving wizard to download video hosting information and prepare it for web publishing. This is a fairly useless function as it is easier and more precise to export the file, or save it to your computer, then upload it to a web publishing website yourself.
The last option that is available in this section of the Tasks menu is to save it to a DV camera. What this does is play the video so that it can be recorded by a digital video camera or tape deck. This can be used for storage or transfer, but since the video is already captured on your computer, being able to put the final film back onto a digital video tape is not a function you will probably tend to use.
The best way to export your finished movie is to just save it as a video file and then use it for whatever you need. The other functions can be useful for very specific purposes, but you will have more versatility after you first save it to your hard drive.
If this is the first article in this series you have read, see the list below for a complete introduction to using Windows Movie Maker to produce your own video content at home.