More on Movie Maker

I remember reading a few years ago a question which asked which version of Movie Maker (MM) was recommended for Windows 7 (it might have been Windows 8 or even Windows 10) as MM no longer comes bundled with Windows. The answer was version 6.2, which was regarded as a compromise between interface, functionality and memory handling. 

After the great disk failure, I had to find to find the source to this version again. I ended up with version 6.0.6002.18005 which had the interface and functionality that I remembered along with poor memory handling. The problems which I had yesterday when working with the Greece video were exacerbated when I tried to 'publish' the movie, i.e. create a composite which can be viewed by the computer, on the television or even on a mobile phone. The program choked after completing about 81% of the video: the resulting file was watchable but lacked the last few minutes (Delphi). I tried to publish the file several times, but each time it crashed at the same spot. I don't know whether there was something wrong with the video stream at this point or whether the program was not capable of more; I don't really care what the reason is, only that I didn't have a complete film.

I tried to find a solution on the Internet; I came out empty handed regarding the version which I have but there was a suggestion to use a more modern version, so I downloaded something which turned out to be MM 2012. This is 'abandonware' which is problematic. The interface is completely different, using the ribbon as in Office programs from 2007 upwards. The program read in the project file and pointed out that some functionality might be lost. Otherwise it seemed that the program could deal with the Greece video: publishing created an mp4 file which was just under 2GB in size (about twice the size of the file from MM 6). I transferred the file to a memory stick, then connected the stick to the television in order to watch in style. Most of the video was ok, but some of the pictures had not been rotated - this is probably what the warning message was about.

This morning, I reloaded the project file (there is now a new one with a different format) and tried to use MM 2012 to correct the rotations. First of all, the program runs very smoothly, which is a great improvement on the earlier version. I was able to find the pictures and rotate them, then publish the project. There are several publishing options available, each resulting in a different sized file. The one I'm using requires about 43 MB/minute; there's one format which requires about 170 MB/minute! There is also a more compressed format (about 10 MB/minute): I'll try that and see what the output is like.

It is not clear how to use the interface of MM 2012 in order to create a video from scratch. I shall have to play with it a little in order to learn it. There appear to be very few effects and transitions, which some might view as a loss: the only effects that I use regularly are rotating pictures and cross-fading between shots, so this isn't a problem. So far, I've found nothing like the 'story board' view which MM 6 has and makes creating videos easy. Should I start a video with MM 6 then transfer to MM 2012? Maybe.