If you have a DV camera, plan on connecting it directly to your computer’s USB 2 or FireWire (IEEE 1394) port.

On the plus side, WMM 2.1 works directly and simply with your digital video (DV) camera, old-fashioned analog video camera, or even a retro VCR. Yes, you read that right: You can’t use files created by Media Center 2004 as input to Windows Movie Maker. dvr-ms files, and you can’t use files from the Sony MicroMV digital video cameras. Thus, you can’t use Windows Media Center Edition 2004′s. You can feed Windows Movie Maker video clips and still pictures in many, many different formats, but it won’t take MPEG-2 files, no way, no how. See Technique 5 for the skinny on defragmenting. That’s more a side effect of editing ten hours of raw vacation videos down to nine and a half hours of sheer boredom.) To handle big movies, you need to have a fast hard drive with lots of free space - and it helps if the drive has been defragmented recently. Symptoms of iron deficiency include unexplained freezes and hangs, video getting out of synch with the audio, color splotches or black bands, and video-induced narcolepsy. Windows Movie Maker makes great demands on your hardware, particularly if you create long movies (er, “projects”), and/or if you try to edit a movie and stick it back on your digital camera. In addition, the Auto Movie generator can make serviceable movies from a handful of clips with just a click. Movie Maker 2′s bag of tricks runneth over, with more than 40 titles ready for you to stick in your movies, 60 transitions, and 30 other effects.

Windows Movie Maker 2, shown in Figure 39-1, is great despite its ability to cause system lockups. Publishing your finished movie to a hard drive, CD, or on the Web Putting your clips together quickly and accurately

Windows movie maker windows xp