Learn Windows Live Movie Maker 1. Windows Live Movie Maker
By: Alan T. Nichols - Program Manager – Corporate and Continuing Education
anichols@broward.edu
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I. Introduction:
Since Windows Live Movie Maker may not be on your desktop, it is a very easy program to install.
Simply search “Download Windows Live Movie Maker” and you will be taken to the link to download
and install. It takes just a few minutes. Once installed you are ready to begin!
Please sign up for Microsoft Live email account and login. This will make creating your Movie Maker
video launch much easier. Go to live.com click on sign up now to obtain your email account and login.
Planning is important in creating any presentation. Consider the duration, message, topic, theme,
length, photos used, film clips used, and music or narration. Be aware of copyright restrictions on
the material that you use. Give attribution to material used as well. Copyright.gov is a good
reference on copyright laws and restrictions.
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II. Navigating The Windows Live Movie Maker Ribbon
The Save Menu: where you open, save, publish, and import pictures and view recent projects. The
options menu gives you the devices such as microphone and webcams that you may use to enhance
your content. Importing pictures from a camera will put the pictures into Windows Live Photo Gallery.
The Home Ribbon: This allows you to copy, cut, and paste content, add video’s, music, record
webcam content, take a snapshot from the webcam, add title, captions, and credits, rotate content,
share on SkyDrive, Facebook, or YouTube, and save your movie.
By Opening the Auto Movies Themes there are several pre-programmed theme’s that you may use for
your video.
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The Animation Ribbon: This allows you to create slide transitions and pan and zoom into a slide or
the presentation.
The Transition menu gives you a number of choices to dissolve, reveals or create cinematic effects
and apply them to one slide or to all of them. Duration of the effect may also be set up to 2
seconds.
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Pan and Zoom provides numerous options to add effects to your slides.
Visual Effects: Gives you the opportunity to create a variety of visual effects that create different
moods and styles for your video.
These include artistic, black and white, cinematic, mirror, and motions and fades. By clicking on
the multiple effects menu you have even more options to mix effects.
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Multiple effects: By simply adding the effect you would like to the multiple effects, you may add
customized effects.
The Project Ribbon: Options include fitting the slides to the length of the video, mix the sound on
the video to be softer or louder than the music that has been added, and by setting the aspect ratio
for your video.
The View Ribbon: Options include zooming, changing the size of the thumbnails on your window,
and previewing your movie in a full screen.
The Edit Ribbon or Video Tools: Options include volume setting, fade in and out at the beginning
of the video, background color for slides, setting the speed of the video, and trimming of video to
edit any video in your window. Note that if you speed up or slow down your video; the sound in the
video will be silenced.
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The Options or Music Tools Ribbon: This is much like the previous ribbon and allows the editing
of the music that has been added to the video.
III. Creating a Windows Movie Maker Video:
Adding Picture, Video, and Music to Movie Maker:
Adding content is quite easy. You may import content from a camera or folder by clicking on the Add
Photos and Music from the Home Ribbon. Dragging and dropping is an easy option
By Clicking on the Add Video’s and Photo’s, Find your content and select where it will add to your
Movie Maker Window.
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Once you add your content it will appear as below
To Add Music you may click on the Add Music tab on the Home Ribbon. A folder will appear as
below and make your music selection:
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By Adding Snapshots it will open your My Photo’s folder where you may add additional content
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Below is how your window will now appear when all pictures and music are added:
Add a Title to Your Video:
By clicking on the add title a number of options appear including a text ribbon where you may
change fonts, font color, bold, italicize, background color, duration of title, and numerous text
effects.
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Add a Caption to your video: You may set the duration of the caption and the effect of the slide.
You may also drag the caption to run between slides.
Adding Credits to your video: Credits are different from captions and titles in that credits may
scroll. The skills for creating credits are the same as creating a title or caption. You may even tell
a story or create a long list of text.
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Saving a Movie: There are a number of options. Consider the purpose of the video and also the
size of the file that you will create.
Give yourself some time in saving the movie.
Publishing a Movie: Below are your options for publishing a movie. With the popularity of video’s
this is an excellent tool to enhance your social media presence.