Hey Guys!
So, today a group came to the desk in a panic asking for help with Windows movie maker. Me, being such a technological advanced human specimen thought "Is that even a thing?" Well, as much as i would love to say that we are out of the cinematic dark ages, it appears that some people, in fact, do still use good ole Window's Movie Maker.
Here is the problem. When i questioned the customer further on what happened, the gentlemen expressed to me, in a quite perturbed manner, that he had come to the desk the other day and someone had helped him save the windows movie maker project onto his flash drive. However, once he returned home, the file was unreadable and he lost all the work he had put into it. Luckily the guy was a trooper and didn't let the loss get him down. After redoing everything he worked on, he came back to the desk with the expectation that i would be able to save his project. At the point i must reiterate that my Windows Movie Maker experience is about as impressive as John Lennon in concert. After expressing my condolences, i worked to save the video and what i found is that the "save project" option isn't enough to do the trick. Then, after enlisting Hannah, we discovered that, similarly to iMovie, Windows Movie Maker needs both the project file AND the pictures/events. Basically, "save project" saves the project as a .wlmp file, which is basically a text file that tells Movie Maker where to place the images.These have to be put into the same folder before being transferred over to another computer.
Happy Computing!
Taylor
Thanks for writing up your experience Taylor. I will add a bit more on this topic. The easiest way to make sure your footage stays with your project in Movie Maker is to set the location to your external drive when importing. To do this click the "More Options" link on the import screen. If you leave it to the default, it will strangely save your videos to the "My Pictures" folder. We do have a guide on using Movie Maker up in the Multimedia Literacy guide here: guides.lib.udel.edu/multimedia under "Post-production", and here is a here is a direct link to the PDF for future reference on Saving your project in Windows Movie Maker: http://www.lib.udel.edu/multimedia/getting_started/tutorials/windows_live_moviemaker.pdf
ReplyDeletethanks for the info. One thing I'd add is before someone leaves, eject their hard or flash drive and try it on a different computer (not the same one) to make sure all the files transferred.
ReplyDeleteI too have come across this problem in the past. I think it would be good for us to re-familiarize ourselves with this prehistoric program because a lot of our customers are trying to us the easiest program possible and believe it or not, that is the easiest.
ReplyDelete