Common MovieMaker Mistakes

Windows XP includes the video editing program MovieMaker. It is pretty basic, but you can use it to transfer video to your hard drive. And it is a nice, free of charge, program to explore the world of digital video editing for the first time. However, there are a couple of pitfalls for users with very limited experience.

Capture format

Microsoft is very much trying to push it's own developed format for Windows Media Video (wmv). Unfortunately they also try to use MovieMaker to convince people that it is the best format to use. When you start MovieMaker and select Capture from video device, a window will appear in which you can choose the format. The very first one says Best quality for playback on my computer and is indicated as recommended.

Inexperienced users may be fooled by this statement. You may think that you can save your movie in this format and some day in the future burn it to DVD. In this case we definitely it is NOT recommendable. The wmv format is a heavily compressed format. By using it, you are already loosing quality right in the start of the process. The only time you may consider to use it is when you capture the footage and have no other plans than just leave it on the hard disk of your system.

The right format to retain best quality for further processing is DV-AVI (the second option). This format is a transfer from your digital tape without any loss of quality. It is very suitable for editing and is accepted by every video editing program. Depending on how you want to store it, you can convert it to any other format that you may need.

Export format

Exactly the same happens again when you are ready to save your work after editing, but then Microsoft even tries to push you even harder to wmv. When you select "Store on this computer" you will come into a screen that just has one selection box called Best quality for playback on my computer (recommended). If you use it, you will again end up with a WMV file. Unless you only want to store it on the hard drive of your PC, it is NOT the recommended choice. Select Display more options and then Other settings and from the selection box choose DV-AVI.

This way you will end up with the best quality and you can go encode it to any other format that you want or import it directly in a DVD authoring program.

PAL or NTSC

If you do select DV-AVI from the selection menu, you may only see DV-AVI (NTSC) while you want PAL, or DV-AVI (NTSC) while you need PAL. The place where you can change the settings is somewhat obscure. You can find it on the Advanced tab under the menu Extra -> Options. Here you can switch between PAL and NTSC.

Export to CD-ROM

Another export option in the list is called Export to CD-ROM. You may think that this will create a VideoCD and you can play it on your DVD player. Well, wrong. What happens is that it will burn a so called HighMAT-CD (High-performance Media Access Technology). This is a format developed by Microsoft and can only be played by players that support that format. These players are very rare and there are hardly any DVD-players that support it. For compatibility reasons you're much better of creating a VideoCD. Only use HighMAT when you're sure that the targeted player is capable of playing these types of CD's.