The program we will be using is Windows Movie Maker. It is already installed in Windows and is a pretty easy-to-use application. We will demonstrate certain techniques that help your movie look professional such as transitions, trimming the clips and effects. A tip to make editing easier is to use a camera with high quality and convert your videos to .wmv.

How to edit:

How to import the clips:

One option is to click Import clips from the task pane.

Choose your video:

Or you can simply drag-n-drop the video on the timeline.

How to trim the clips:

Drag-n-drop your clip on the storyboard. Click now "Show Timeline":

But what is trimming?

The procedure of hiding unwanted parts of an audio or video clip or file. When you trim a clip, the information is not removed; it is hidden from your audience, so unwanted parts do not appear in your project and final saved movie

By trimming clips, you can edit the starting and ending point—and therefore the length—of any video or audio clips that you have added to your project on the timeline. When trimming, you can set the start and end trim points. The start trim point determines when the clip will begin to play, and the end trim point determines when the clip will stop playing in your project. You can drag the trim handles, which are shown in the following illustration, to trim the unwanted parts of the clip.

Or to just remove a specific part of the film without losing the start or end you can use the split function. There are two different ways to do it.

In the Contents pane or on the storyboard/timeline, click the clip you want to split.

On the Play menu, click Play Clip, and then click Pause Clip on the Play menu to pause the video at the point you want to split the clip -or- On the monitor, move the playback indicator on the seek bar to the point you want to split the clip.

On the Clip menu, click Split or click this button

How to mute a clip and add background music:

On the Audio or Audio/Music track of the timeline, select the audio clip that you want to mute. On the Clip menu, point to Audio, and then click Mute or right-click the video and select mute.

To add background music drag-n-drop the music file here:

Basic effects:

Click on "View video effects". This should take you to the video effects collection.

Now simply click on a effect and you can see it on the preview monitor. If it is the one you need drag-n-drop it on the video to use it.

Titles & Subtitles:

To add a title just click on "Add titles or credits" on the task pane.

It should take you to the title menu:

If it's the opening credits that you want, click "Add a title at the beginning of the movie"

If it's a subtitle on the selected clip, click "Add a title ON the selected clip on the storyboard"

If it's the closing credits you want, click "Add credits at the end of the movie".

For our example we will create a title at the beginning of the movie.

What you write on the top box will appear on top and what you write on the second box will appear as a subtitle, as shown:

Now let's click where it says "Change the title animation and color" and choose "Subtitle":

You will notice that only "my" (what we wrote on the top box) appears. That's because not all title animations use two boxes.

Click on "Change the title font and color"

Here you choose the font, color, transparency and size of your titles.

How to add transitions:

Click on "View video transitions"

Choose the one that suits you and drag-n-drop it on your video. (Remember if you click on it once, you can preview it)

How to save your movie:

Click on "Save to my computer".

Choose the name of your video and a place to save it:

Then we highly recommend that you choose "Best fit to file size" and increase size to the maximum to avoid loss of quality.

A few things we do to help us and will most likely help you too:

• Save your project, not video, every once in a while by clicking Ctrl+S (That format cannot play in other computers)

• Avoid moving your video files from one folder to another

• While trimming try to move frame-by-frame so you have total control of what you are doing

• Enlarge your timeline so you can see all that's going on in your video/music

You can do it, you know you can,

SavouroFilms Productions