In my last posting, I went over the basics of creating a new video project using Windows Movie Maker on your PC. In this post, I will touch on some of the basics for editing your clip including fades, transitions, titles and credits, and replacing or supplementing your existing audio with music.

Previously, we had created a new project by importing a video clip as well as a couple of music files from a folder on our PC. With that project open, we can now start putting the elements together. To begin with, make sure the video clip has been dragged to the storyboard at the bottom of the screen. If you are viewing the added items in the stroyboard view, you will see that Windows Movie Maker places any additional video clips in the next open large box. If you add a music file however, it does not “appear” in this view. Don’t worry – the music clip did get added. at this point, we are going to change to the “timeline” view.

Looking at the project in the “timeline” view, we can see the individual elements, and an actual time track showing how long each element is. Each element also has it’s own track inside this view, making it easier to work on them one at a time. Next to the video track, you will see a plus sign to expand this view. Clicking on this will show you the audio currently embedded with the video clip. All of the items on the storyboard can me quickly edited by right-clicking the individual track and selecting the option you want. Let’s start with the embedded audio (if you have any) first.

Quick note – from this point on, I will refer to some things as “best practices”. These aren’t requirements, just useful things that I have picked up on through my own work and through input from others in working on my own projects at home and at work.

If you right-click on the audio track, you will see a couple of options – mute, fade in, fade out and volume. the mute option will do just that – mute the entire audio track embedded with the clip. Fade in and fade out will automatically adjust the volume of the audio track at the the beginning and end with a two second fade. Selecting volume will allow you to change the ENTIRE volume level of the track. this is something that you will have to experiment with based on the clip you are working with. as a best practice – you never want audio to start or stop abruptly. you also never want audio to be “booming” in a track. Keep in mind that most people leave their speakers on a low to medium level, so try to keep your audio or music for the final project to a 3/4 or 2/3 setting.

As you make changes to your project, remember to preview the changes. the preview pane on the right hand side of the screen works just like Windows Media Player. You can play, pause or use the drag bar to move through the clip to a specific portion. One item that will help you immensely is the “split” button. This let’s you split the clip in to smaller pieces to work with. if you are running a slower PC, this can be really handy since it takes less time for the changes you make to get processed and to review. Note however that if you split a clip with embedded audio, it will split that audio as well. this does not effect the final clip though, and play back will still run seamlessly.

What about adding background music to a video clip, or even replacing the embedded audio with music completely? This is actually a lot easier than it sounds. Any music files that you want to use – either stored on your PC or from a CD – can be imported in to the project and dragged to the audio / music track in the timeline. The same basic controls apply (mute, fades, volume) as they did with the embedded audio. But you can also “drag” the files along the time line to a specific part of the movie. As an example – we have all seen on videos and TV shows where they have background sound or music set in to match the scene for dramatic effect. Say you wanted to go from you talking in the clip to dancing, but the mic on your camera isn’t picking up the music from your CD player that you are dancing to? You can mute the embedded audio from the point where you quit talking, import the music to the project from the CD you were dancing to, and drag the music to the point in the video to where you start dancing. This takes a little practice to get just right, but the effect is worth the time.

The last thing we are going to talk about is adding fades and titles / credits to your video. Just as you did with the audio tracks, right-clicking on the video track will give you quick options. In this case it is effects, fade in and fade out. Fades are a wonderful thing! just as you don’t want audio to abruptly start and stop, you also don’t want video to do this. By right-clicking and selecting fade in and fade out close to the beginning and end of the clip, the software will add a two second fade automatically for you. You can edit the length of the fades if you wish, but as a best practice you generally don’t want to have a fade exceed four seconds. As for effects, well there are a lot of great ones that are included with Windows Movie Maker. Time and space don’t allow for me touch on all of them. But a word of caution – effects can do wonderful things for your projects, but using too many effects is just like having too many cooks…it ruins the meal.

The last thing we will touch on today is titles and credits. This is purely a personal choice to add or not. Titles are great for identifying your finished video to the person watching when either the file name that you save the final video to is something obscure, or the person who downloaded the file has changed the saved name to something else. Windows Movie Maker give you the option to change the text, text style, text size, background color, font color and scrolling options. The same applies for credits. but remember – simpler is generally better.

As with my previous post, I have embedded a YouTube video going over all of this information (with the exception of titles and credits).

I am also including a link this time to project I did a couple years ago for some friends here. This was done completely using Windows Movie Maker, just to show some of the interesting things you can do.

Sample Video

As always, I hope this has made your project less of a chore, and feel free to contact me with any questions. until next time…

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