Editing Your Video with Windows Moviemaker

We’ve talked about why you should make video posts for your blog, we’ve looked at how easy it is to make a video, so now we’re going to cover editing. If you’re a Mac user, then this probably isn’t relevant to you, but if you have a PC, you’ll have a simple program called Windows Moviemaker, and that’s what we’re going to use. As you’ll notice from the screenshots, my operating system is in Spanish, but I’ll provide translations. So here we go:

Why do we need to edit?

Even if you made your video in one segment, you’ll probably need to cut the start and finish off (the parts where you started the camera and then turned it off), you’ll also need to add titles, and possibly compress the video to upload to the web. If it’s a multi-scene video, you’ll need to “join” the scenes together into one continuous video. Moviemaker will do all of these things for us.

Import your video

When you open the Moviemaker, you’ll be presented with a screen that looks like this:

In the top left hand corner you’ll see a button marked “Import video”. Click that, then go and find your video segments and import them all. You’ll see they appear in the middle window as shown in this screenshot:

As you can see – we have three segments in the middle window. Next step is to drag them, in the correct order into the timeline at the bottom of the page, one segment per box:

And there they are!

Editing the segments

Next step is to “top and tail” each segment. So click on the first and press play on the player to the right. When you get to the part where you want to start the video from, press pause. Now you can use the forward and reverse buttons to get the start of the video exactly where you want it. Once you’re happy, go to “clip” and then “Initial cut.” Moviemaker has now cut the front part of the first segment in the timeline. If you press play again now, you’ll see that the video starts from the point you wanted it to.

Now we need to do the same with the end of that segment. Follow the same process, get your video to the exact point you want to finish that segment, and go to “Clip” then press “Final cut”

Perform exactly the same operation on any remaining clips, and you’re editing is done! Now just run through the whole video and make sure you’re happy with the start and finish of each segment.

Dividing a Segment

There are times when you need to divide a segment. If, for example, you had to move the camera, but left it running during the process, or if you made a mistake and restarted a section in the middle of a segment. What you can do here is pause within the segment at the exact point you want to split it, then press “Divide” in the bottom right hand corner. This will make two segments out of one, and you can top and tail each as I’ve already described.

Adding Titles

Moviemaker allows you to add simple titles to your video – opening titles, in video titles and credits. I tend to stick to a very simple opening title introducing myself and my site, then finish with just the URL of the site. To add titles hit the “Titles and Credits” button on the left, and you’ll see the various options. Simply type what you want to appear and Moviemaker will run a short video to show you what it will look like on screen.

Saving the finished movie

Now run through the whole thing once again, to make sure the titles look good and everything works. Next we’re going to save the movie to our hard drive. Moviemaker calls this “Publish”, so we’re going to use the left hand buttons again, and click “Publish on this equipment” This will bring up this screen, where you can choose a name for your video, and decide where you would like it saved:

Once you’ve done that click “Next” and you’ll be presented with a screen that enables you to compress the movie. It will default to “Best quality for watching on my PC” but immediately below that is a button you can press to choose what size you would like the finished product to be. My videos are only about 5 to 8 minutes long and I generally keep them to between 50 and 80 MB, which seems to give a decent quality for web viewing.

Now click “Publish”! Within a few minutes, Moviemaker will have saved your new video to your hard drive. Once it’s finished, go and run through it again to make sure everything is alright. You’re now ready to upload it to your  video host!

There are several more sophisticated things you can do with Moviemaker. For example, you can add transitions to segments, so they fade into one another or you can add a music soundtrack. When you have some time, play with these features, but they’re not essential to getting video onto your blog, and too much fancy stuff can detract from the conversation.

Tomorrow, I’ll cover the next step in the process – uploading to single or multiple sites, which ones to use and how to get video viewers to your blog.

Maybe also check out:

1/ First steps for a rookie blogger

2/ Working in batches as a blogger

3/ Give great service to your blog readers