The collection of Windows Live apps available for XP, Vista and Windows 7 is a grab bag of useful and useless (to me) apps that I’d avoided for some time since my last exposure to the collection in the Windows 7 Beta. But. I have a growing collection of unmanageably huge wtv files from Windows Media Center recordings, and wanted to burn the things to DVD in a usable format, so…
Of to the M$ Windows Live download site for the Windows Live Movie Maker Beta. Sure, it meant telling the installer app “Hell no!” when it wanted to install the crappy Windows Live mail and other useless junk, but the photo management app and Movie Maker (which, strangely, does not come in ANY version with Windows 7) were what I wanted to try out, so off to the races.
And with just a lil fumbling around, the Movie Maker Beta converted a wtv of the season premiere of Burn Notice to wmv format. OK enough, I suppose, for archiving. But it’s really, really slow and borked on me once, requiring a retry. Not only that, but the one-hour show is still more than a 3GB file size! What will I do with 2 hour shows? *mpph* Not good enough. Worse? “Editing” capabilities in the app are almost non-existant. Very “not good enough”.
I have never encountered a version of Windows Movie Maker that I liked. I’ve always ditched it in favor of Roxio or Pinnacle Studio’s movie editing tools, although they are somewhat cumbersome as well. Lately I’ve been using Cyberlink’s PowerProducer, since it came with my video camera, but I really don’t like the bugs it’s infested with. Importing media into the library causes the app to crash about 1 in 5 times.
Generally, once I have the video I want in an appropriate format (either an MPEG-2 stream or an AVI) I use VirtualDub to process it, then stitch scenes together with Cyberlink PowerProducer. I use SUPER for format conversion, and Roxio to burn my DVDs.
Ditto here, Perri. I thought I’d give the newest a try, though, but it is, if anything, less capable than the XP WMM. Not to worry, though, there are plenty of tools available in Linux once I convert the new, DISimproved Windows Media Center format to a usable one… *heh* Still booting back and forth, despite the woes upgrading to Ubuntu 9.04 from 8.10. (In fact, I’m considering ditching Ubuntu 9.04 for Xubuntu or another varient.)
That sucks. Also… I have no idea what you’re talking about.
Well, I finally got a WMV file out of WMM that has sync’ed sound/video, but it took several more hours’ processing. Don’t like WMM, but the other software I have for video editing is all either Linux-based or Windows versions that don’t play well w/Win7–even in compatibility mode–yet. Oh. Well. I can always just keep filling up the 500GB HDD I have the recordings going to now and convert them later when I have a better Win7 solutioin or have converted them to a format I can use the Linux apps to edit.
I’ve never had any trouble with Movie Maker. Is the Win 7 version different than the Vista one?
Oh, WMM isn’t any trouble, just fewer capabilities than I’ve used before with Linux (Kino, Avidemux, others) or commercial apps like the simple Roxio or Pinnacle apps Perri mentioned (earlier iterations of whicxh I have tried/used). I haven’t actually tried the WMM included with Vista, although I did a tutorial w/my Wonder Woman on using the one for XP for a class she was taking and it was… OK, just not all that great. The Windows Live WMM Beta I used for the video in the post is simply the least capable video editing software I’ve ever tried, besides being sllllooooowwwww.
I don’t know if the problem hides in the Windows Movie Maker or in plain Windows, but when operating the first, it jams at least twice a day.