| Oct262009 | Windows Live Movie Maker 14.0 Review |
Final verdict: More barebones than iMovie and only exports WMV. Useable and easy but falls short for Jack.
As you know, I’m in the midst of seeing if I could switch back to Windows. Using Windows Live Movie Maker made me miss iMovie dearly. Mostly because iMovie is very familiar to me and I was kicking and screaming as to why everything had to be different. But there were a few legitimate gripes too.
I recorded a video recently of me doing a (very amateur) cover of Radiohead’s No Surprises. I recorded this in my living room with my Flip MinoHD, a cheap but popular consumer-grade camera that many geeks are tinkering around with for super-casual video. Here’s what my video looks like in Movie Maker:
It’s a familiar layout for anyone that’s used iMovie before. On the left is where you watch the video. The other part is a “film strip” where you get to see your entire video laid out like a long sentence. Unlike iMovie, there’s no third pane where you can cut and paste film strips from the raw video. Instead, Movie Maker will just import the entire thing into your work area and leave you to work it into your finished movie like flour into dough. Biggest problem here: the thumbnails are all identical. I had about 15 minutes of footage and I only used the last 4 minutes and it doesn’t help when I have no thumbnails at all to reference. It’s most likely because Flip is using some MP4 format and I guess I should be glad that it imported the video at all.
Number 2: No timestamp over the playhead in the film strip area. I get absolutely no sense of time scale.
Number 3: There is no obvious split button. There’s a cute little bar down the bottom to control the size and time interval of the thumbnails but nothing to split it into separate strips that can be moved around. How do we do it then?
It’s under this Video Tools > Edit part of the ribbon! Which is entirely redudant because this is Movie Maker and practically everything I want to do involves “editing video”. Split and Trim should be made as first-class citizens of the toolbar where the thumbnail buttons are.
Transitions are super easy and better for novices. You just click and it makes the transition. iMovie gives you finer control but it gets a bit fiddly trying to manage it all. Adding transitions in Movie Maker is as easy as making text bold.
Last bitching point, the volume slider:
Drag this around to change the volume of your selected clip. Except it starts at 100% and that means you can only decrease volume. Consumer video is shitty and we don’t have sound technicians and boom mic operators. My video turned out super fucking quiet even though I was only sitting three feet away. We need 1) to crank shit up to 400% (I think iMovie doesn’t go this high) and 2) a basic noise or “hissing” filter.
Overall, I actually kind of like Movie Maker. It’s a rare gem because it’s a Microsoft product that’s on a strict diet. It does the very basic video stuff and little else. It hasn’t morphed into the strange creature that iMovie is today. It just needs to take a few more (big) steps to make home videos look automatically brilliant and I could actually recommend it to people. Personally, I’m still more of a power user and I’ll continue to maintain my allegiance to iMovie.
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