It Shouldn’t Be This Hard To Edit A Movie

In my last blog post I embedded a movie that I had uploaded to SoapBox. The path that video, and myself, took to get to that point is EPIC.

It all started with recording the video with my trusty Sony camcorder. I copied over the file to my Windows 7 machine…file format is MPG. The size was 118 MB, but SoapBox has a 100MB limit. Easiest way to alter that: Movie Maker. As I’m all about the Windows Live suite of tools, I opened up Movie Maker Beta. I was a huge fan of Movie Maker 2.6, and I hadn’t had an opportunity to try out the new version.

Let me plead with you, all of you, that you should *NOT* use Movie Maker Beta. They have neutered that thing like you wouldn’t believe. Consider the screenshot below:

There’s no timeline, limited effects…its just a shell of what the former Movie Maker application was. In addition, it wouldn’t play *any* of my video file. I know its still in Beta, but c’mon guys…we need more.

So it turns out that if you want Movie Maker 2.6, you can still get it. Microsoft released it for Vista (and as such, Windows 7) and you can download it from here.

However even with 2.6, my video still wouldn’t show up in the application! I can run it from Windows Media Player, but not Movie Maker 2.6. It turns out that the codec used to play mpg files in WMP is *not* available for Movie Maker. Oh, and that goes for the audio codec too (which, btw, I was able to get a free version of at this site here).

The audio codec was important, because in a stroke of what I thought was genius I decided to give Expression Encoder a try, thinking that this *must* be why that application was created in the first place. I load it up, load up my movie and…I see a picture! So somehow, the video codec worked with Encoder. I was getting a message saying the audio codec was no where to be found (hence the 3rd party download).

So once I got the audio codec downloaded, and now that I knew that Encoder had the proper video codec, I was able to use it to transform my MPG into a WMV file and a quarter of the original size!

So the moral of all this:

• - Movie Maker Beta is usable only by Kylie.
  
  - Movie Maker 2.6 is still available, but you need extra codecs to make it work properly for  
•   some file formats.
  
  - Expression Encoder is a great application for taking large file formats and re-sizing them, and
•   not just for use in a Silverlight media streaming application. Don’t overlook this piece of the
•   Expression Suite.
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