For most people it is going to be difficult to just use capture devices in Windows Movie Maker. This requires your Windows PC to have a real capture card and you have to then include a tape deck or plug in your digital video camera directly. Instead, it is always going to be best to use a digital storage device on your camera. This can be in the form of a hard drive, memory card, thumb drive, or any other device. From here the camera saves the video as a file that can then just be uploaded to your computer like a regular data file. From here you go through an import process into your Windows Movie Maker project. This is the easiest way to get video into your Windows Movie Maker editing project, not to mention outside archival or found video footage. Here is the easy step by step guide to importing video into your Windows Movie Maker project.
Open up Windows Movie Maker and go to File on the left hand side of the upper task bar. Go down and select Import Into Collections from the list. You can use a keyboard shortcut for this by pressing Control and I. This will then take you into your storage device where you can navigate either your computer internal storage or outside storage device. You will see below in the File Type pull down menu that you are automatically cleared to view many movie file types. These include .wav, .aif, .aiff, .snd, .and others. From here you just navigate the storage areas until you find the saved file you want to import into your Windows Movie Maker video editing project.
At the bottom of the navigation window you will see a text box that says “Create clips for video files” next to it. If this is selected then the video clip that you’re importing will break up into smaller clips when it gets into your Windows Movie Maker Collections. If you just want to deal with one solid video clip, which is much easier to work with, then uncheck this box.