You've gathered your pictures, video clips, and tunes. The editing phase is where you put them together in the sequence you want, and add audience pleasing visual transitions and effects.
Standard or Widescreen?
In XP's Movie Maker, selecting standard 4:3 versus widescreen 16:9 aspect ratio was important. With Vista's Movie Maker, your choice was simply to align the shape of your saved movie with the screen you were going to display it on.
In Windows Live Movie Maker, you can skip the choice entirely. It provides a standard 4:3 sized output file with clips appropriately letterboxed within it. You can mix and match input files without thinking about how to fix them to align with the others.
Project Files
Windows Live Movie Maker supports the saving of your work to a project file so you can open it again later and do more editing, or produce more movies from it. But there's a new simplifying twist.
The project files (.mswmm files) for other versions of Movie Maker are encrypted, with no utilities to edit them. This limits changes to those made in the appropriate version of Movie Maker. The new Windows Live Movie Maker uses a new file type, .wlmp (I guess it stands for Windows Live Movie Project). This project file is a simple text xml one that will give users the way into editing a project without having to open Windows Live Movie Maker. Open and edit it with Notepad... power users, geeks and hackers should love it.
I've not had a hang or freeze yet in the beta of Windows Live Movie Maker, but my usual rule of caution applies "... save the project file early and often...". And back it up when it becomes important.
Editing
Editing features are not yet fleshed out in the beta version. It's clear there will be visual effects and transitions, but I don't yet know which ones or how many, or if third party add-on packages will be supported.
There are three tabs on the main working window, In the Home tab you add images, video clips and audio files. And, if a project consists only of still pictures, there's an option to have Movie Maker automatically align the picture durations with the length of the background music. The Visual Effects tab lets you apply special effects and transitions. The Edit tab provides features for text overlays, trimming video clips, and setting the duration of still pictures. Unlike earlier versions of Movie Maket, the Windows Live version lets you make changes to the durations of multiple pictures.
The project accepts only a single tune. Adding a second one replaces the first. There are no audio volume adjustments, but there's a relative volume slider to mix the audio of the video clips with that of the music track.
Images
Windows Live Movie Maker
The Windows Live version of Movie Maker is the biggest change to come to Movie Maker since it was first released in Windows Me 8 years ago. It promises to be better yet smaller. Join us in looking at the evolution of this new version.