Windows' included video editing software is all about simplicity: There's really no simpler way to combine your clips into digital movies with titles, transitions, background music, and effects. In earlier releases, the program was so simple that it wasn't capable of doing things people commonly needed, but little by little, stuff like voiceover recording and even anti-shake have made their way into what is now a very useful free app for digital video editing. Let's be clear, Movie Maker still lacks a lot of effects and tools you get in Apple's entry-level video editor, iMovie, not to mention enthusiast-level products like Adobe Premiere Elements or CyberLink PowerDirector, but for basic needs and ease of use, it hits the mark.
Installation
You can only install Movie Maker as the Essentials bundle, a free set of lifestyle and utility apps for Windows 7 and Windows 8 that also includes Windows Photo Gallery. The single installer for all the Essentials apps offers an initial option of installing everything or letting you choose which to install. Since you may not need the Family Safety program, for example, I recommend the latter installation option. Movie Maker installs as a desktop application in Windows 8, and unfortunately, is not available for Windows RT tablets (though they do have alternatives like ArcSoft ShowBiz).
Interface
Like iMovie, Movie Maker uses a simplified version of the standard video editor timeline, with clips represented by "long thumbnails." The first frame is shown at full contrast, while the following ones are faded, in a distinction between this look and iMovie's. The thumbnail tracks optionally show you the audio waveforms along the bottom, so you can see where the loud and quiet parts of your video lay. You get five size choices for the thumbs, which is probably enough, and a zoom control at the bottom lets you stretch out these clip representations. You can trim or split clips using the cursor insertion point combined with edit buttons. It's quite easy once you get used to the unique editing system used by the app: you click at a point in your clip, and can then drag the resulting insertion line around the timeline.
Similar Products
Apple iMovie
CyberLink PowerDirector 365
Adobe Premiere Elements
As with just about any video editor, you can stop and start playback with the space bar, but Movie Maker gives you the three control buttons, play/pause, and step back and forward one frame.
One of the things I really like about working in Movie Maker is that most of the effects, transitions, and themes preview automatically when you just hover the mouse cursor over their buttons. Another plus is the undo and redo buttons are right up top—video editing is a very trial-and-error process—but I suppose it's too much to ask for a history window in such a simple application.
Import and Organize
The easiest way to get video clips into Movie Maker is to tap the "Click here to browse for videos and photos" button in the main timeline area. There's also a permanent Add videos and photos button on the Home tab. Each button opens the Pictures library, where most people's point-and-shoot videos land when they import from camera media. There's also an "Import from Device" choice in the File menu; this just opens the Windows photo/video importer, which actually does a decent job of letting you apply keyword tags and saves the image and clips to date-and-time-organized folders—not unlike iPhoto's "Events." And finally, you can start capturing video from your PC's webcam.
When you first add a clip into Movie Maker, you'll see a clock icon over its timeline entry. This is because the app creates a smaller shadow copy of the clip to make it speedier to work within the editor than full resolution would be.
Basic Video EditingThe simplest way to create a digital movie in Movie Maker is to add your clips to the timeline and choose one of the seven AutoMovie Themes—Default, Contemporary, Cinematic, Fade, Pan and Zoom (best used with photos), Black and White, and Sepia. It's nowhere near as extensive a set of options you'll see in iMovie, let alone Adobe Premiere Elements, but they're in simple good taste. These are displayed as thumbnails in the center of the Home ribbon. They add an intro title screen, transitions, and credits to the production.
The basic video editing operations such as trimming, splitting are available from the last menu—Edit—and they also snap into view if you double click a clip in your timeline. The Trim tool simply adds start and end handles to the preview window's scrubber line, but you can do the same thing from the main timeline by tapping "Set start point" or "Set end point."
The Edit menu also contains the new Stabilization choice if you're running Windows 8 or 8.1, as well as play speedup and slow-mo (this retains the audio, so you can have fun making you and your friends sound like chipmunks or lions). As in iMovie, all editing is done in the same thumbnail/timeline area—no popup windows for trimming like you find in other video editors like CyberLink PowerDirector.
Video Fixes
The one lighting control is found under the Visual Effects menu, way to the right of all the snazzy Instagram-like filter effects. The brightness control worked as expected, but contrast and saturation controls would help—let alone iMovie's powerful level controls.
One very important fix you do get in Movie Maker is rotation: how many of us have unthinkingly shot video with our smart phone facing upright, when that's not the way to shoot video on any planet I know of!
Stabilization and Fancy Video Effects
StabilizationThis new Windows 8-only feature (it takes advantage of updated graphics capabilities in the OS core) is accessible from the Edit menu and offers three options: Anti-shake, Anti-shake and wobble correction – low, and Anti-shake and wobble correction – high. I tested it on a 39-second handheld clip. The first option took a snappy 7 seconds on my 3.4GHz Quad Core test PC with an Nvidia Quadro 2000 graphics card and 8GB RAM. That quick Anti-shake option did a world of good for my video, eliminating all the minor shakes, though it still left some of the big ones in. Adding the low level of wobble correction took 20 seconds.
Fancy Effects
For a free movie editing product, Movie Maker sure offers a slew of transition effects, and a lot of them are high quality rather than goofy, as these things can be; along with the standard dissolves and fades, you get reveals, patterns, shatters, sweeps and curls, wipes and more. It's not the level of choice you get in PowerDirector or Premiere Elements, but there's plenty to work with.
Another set of effects appears under the Visual Effects tab. These include artistic filters such as Blur, Edge Detection (for a sketched look), Posterize, and Threshold, which bestows a psychedelic, intensified colorized look. In a more art-film vein, there are six black and white options. Rounding out the options are Cinematic swirls, and a good choice of motions and fades—pixelate, 360 spin, and warp. One point about all these effects—they're one-button deals—there's no adjusting their strength or other parameters with sliders, as you find in a more-complicated app like PowerDirector.
Audio
Right on the program's home screen is a big ole Add music button, which lets you use any MP3, WAV, M4A, OGG, AIF, or WMA files you can navigate to the folder of. You also get choices to find music on AudioMicro, Free Music Archive, and Vimeo. Some of the themes ask you to add background music when you apply them as well. Once you've got some background tunes attached to your movie, you can click on the Music Tools tab to adjust its volume, fade in and out, and set start and end points.
Some very useful audio tools are on another tab—Project. Here you can choose to emphasize music, video sound, voice narration, or none. These worked well in my testing; negating the need for the slider control that set relative sound levels when you don't click either "Emphasize" button; but it's there if you need it. One thing you don't get is any form of audio cleanup—the ability to remove background sounds, hums, and the like—offered by products like Premiere Elements and PowerDirector.
Another button on the Project ribbon will be most welcome to many users: Fit to Music. This is best used with photos if you visual content is too short. If your video content is too long, though, you'll be asked to remove some; I'd prefer the program to just repeat the song, but you can still do that manually.
Voiceover narration is very simply added when you tap the Record narration from the home screen. It appears as another (this time brown) waveform track under the clip.
Titles
Movie Maker is surprisingly strong at adding titles or captions to your digital movies: you can choose any font on your system, move the text box around anywhere on the screen, and even choose from 24 animations to have the text fly, swing, spin, slide, or zoom into view. Text added to you move gets its own small track below the clip thumbnail/tracks, and you can easily edit it with a double-click. It actually gives you a lot more leeway to customize fonts than iMovie does, with the Apple programs enforcement of its idea of good taste.
Sharing, Performance, Wrap
Sharing and OutputNot only can Movie Maker directly share your digital movies to the most liektly places you're going to want to share them to—Email, Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo, and Flickr, but it also supports a plugin API for any developer to add their service as a sharing target. Unfortunately, I only found two beyond the defaults—SmugMug and Mediashare.
When I started sharing my project to Facebook, a dialog box popped up with a choice of sizes, including estimated file sizes. After this, you need to sign into a Microsoft account, even to share to Facebook. You can also upload to and share via SkyDrive. I was disappointed to see that I couldn't set my movie's privacy level or target album. YouTube sharing did, however, not only let me but required me to add tags and set viewing permission levels.
Rendering my just-under-2-minute video complete with background music, subtitles, and effects took 720p took a swift 44 seconds. It was immediately and pleasantly viewable on SkyDrive upon uploading—no waiting for YouTube processing.
If your intention is to simply save your movie project as a video file, the app offers a wealth of output device targets—high-definition display, computer, email, Android phone, iPad even Zune! There are also formats tailored to sharing sites like Blip.TV, DailyMotion, and more. I'm very happy to report that the program now saves to the universally understood MP4 format as well as to Microsoft's WMV format.
Performance and What You Don't Get
Never once did Movie Maker stop responding or crash in any way—something of a feat for any video editing software. Furthermore, during all my editing and enhancing, performance on my 3.4GHz quad-core test PC was rapid. I never found myself waiting for an operation to finish, aside from the stabilization tool, which is par for that feature in any program.
Yes, Movie Maker gives you everything you need to create an appealing digital movie, but compared with a product such as PowerDirector, it's just scratching the surface. There's no picture-in-picture, no Green Screen, multicam support, freeze frame (though you could actually re-create this effect with the program's Snapshot tool). Most of its effects are not adjustable, just prefab. And I mentioned that there's no audio cleanup tools.
Making Movies the Easy Way
I was really impressed with how easy Movie Maker let me do all of the basics of video editing, and even some of the more advanced things like speedup and slowdown. It's actually one of the funnest products to use that I've tested in a while. It shields you from all the complexities of multitrack, timecode, and keyframe video editing: Everything is in an intuitive, responsive interface that most anyone could figure out. Granted, Microsoft's free video editor provides nowhere near the level of control you get in our enthusiast-level video software Editors' Choice, CyberLink PowerDirector, but for the simplicity and capabilities it does offer, Windows Movie Maker is well worth an Editors' Choice for entry-level Windows video editing software.
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