Editing A Video In Windows Live Movie Maker Part One - Functions Of Movie Maker

When editing videos and you have a Windows formatted PC or laptop then you will have already installed or you should Windows Live Movie Maker which is a video editing software which you can create and edit your own video movie files by placing them in a storyboard timeline and shift different elements around to create a video. Your videos can be anything from family home movies or instructional videos you might want to upload to YouTube, but in the end they are all edited the same through Windows Movie Maker. Let us walk through the many different editing functions!

There are six tabs at the top of the movie maker program and the first one is Movie Maker which is sort of like the File tab on word processor software in which you can choose to open a file to work with or choose a new project to work on. the other functions are to save your video projects to work on at a later stage.

The next tab is the Home tab in which you have access to a range of different functions including an add videos and photos button, an add music or audio button, an add webcam video button and an option to take a current snapshot of the current frame of your video, which is often called a Thumbnail. After this is three vertical icons which are the branding options with which you can add an intro title sequence, a caption and the end credits, so that when you come to share or upload your video then it is branded with your chosen title and name which is optional, but it's always a good idea to include your web address if any or copyright notice to deter content thieves.

Still staying in the Home tab the next functions are AutoMovie themes which are presets that are very basic effects and options that I never personally use because they refer to very different formats of videos. The next four small icons are just there to fill up the space and they are Rotate your video or photo left or right and a red cross that is to remove elements out of the video sequence and also a small square button to select all the sequential pieces of the video timeline. The Share functions allow you to share your videos with YouTube, Facebook, Windows Live Groups and Flickr and also to choose your format to save to your computer with HD being the larger file size and the email one which is the low quality file saving size.

And lastly in the Home tab is the Sign In button which is intended for you to sing into your Windows Live account and share content on your profile and hosted Wordpress blog through Windows.

The next two tabs Animations and Visual Effects are a series of basic looking transitional elements that with some you can overlay the entire video or just sections of the video that you can click and drag into your video timeline. The nest two tabs at the top are Project and View which have options to make the audio run at the same time as the video and Widescreen view with zoom in and out and thumbnail size adjusting.

And last of all the Edit tab helps to edit some other different elements within the video like video volume, audio fade in and fade out, the background color of the video can be changed and also the run speed and duration of the background photo and last of all we have the all important video trim options to tidy up videos and cut off loose ends that don't make sense, the split option splits one video into two and you can then choose to set a start and end point for your video file.

Now, that's all the functions out of the way, lets explain how to edit a video in part two coming soon....