If you've had the chance to acquaint yourself with the basics of the new Windows Live Movie Maker, you may be wondering "well, where can I go next?" We've got the tips for you right here.
There are a few things we're going to check out here to take you to the next level with Movie Maker. Follow them, and you'll be editing like a pro in no time.
Video Editing Keyboard Shortcuts
Once you've got used to moving around in Movie Maker a bit, you'll soon want to start doing the simple things a lot more quickly. So rather than going up to the menu to select and clicking on the option you want, why not start memorising a few keyboard shortcuts? . In Windows Live Movie Maker we support all of the standard Windows and Office shortcut keys (i.e. Save, Open, Undo, Redo, Cut/Copy/Paste, etc…). You can find a list of all of our keyboard shortcuts here (or by choosing Help and searching on the word ‘keyboard’).
First of all, a quick one is the Play/Pause toggle (the ‘space’ bar or the ‘K’ key). Why the ‘K’ key? Well, commonly used shortcut keys in video editing programs include “J”, “K” and “L”. The “J” keys steps back one frame while the “L” key jumps forward one frame. Since the keyboard repeats you can hold down the “L” key and depending on the size of your video (and performance of your PC) you can get almost real-time playback. When using the “J” and “L” keys it’s convenient to use the “K” key to Play/Pause the video.
Next, another common action is to Trim the beginning or end of the video and Split a video. In Movie Maker these commands are based on the current cursor (caret) position. So you can scrub to a specific point in a video clip then press the “M” key to Split the video at exactly that point. The “I” key will trim off the beginning (from the caret position) and the “O” key will trim off the end of the video (from the caret position).
While we no longer have the timeline in Windows Live Movie Maker we now have a simple storyboard. The new Storyboard is approachable to the most novice user yet, it can still represent time visually! To zoom in (expand time) on the storyboard use the “+” key while the zoom out shortcut is the “-“ key (go figure…). You’ll note however that when we zoom in that the thumbnail representing the video clip is simply replicated.
Quick Access toolbar
Admittedly there are a lot of features exposed in the new “Scenic” ribbon that don’t have keyboard shortcuts. The good news though is that if you add those features to the Quick Access area of the Ribbon then you can use the keyboard shortcuts ALT-1 through ALT-0 to access those features!
To add a QAT (‘Quick Access Toolbar’ as we call it) shortcut, simply right-click on any button in the Ribbon and choose “Add to Quick Access Toolbar”:
It will then show up in the QAT and you can use the assigned “ALT” key to access it (press “ALT” to see what key is assigned to your new QAT entry).
Multiple Monitor Support
Since Windows seamlessly supports multiple monitors, we do too! This means that you can size the window for Windows Live Movie Maker across two separate monitors to get a nice, large Preview Window along with a large screen to use with the Storyboard:
Time-Lapse Videos
Time-lapse videos look great and are incredibly easy to make using Movie Maker, the slightly trickier part comes in getting your shots right. To get the right kind of shots to use in a time-lapse video, you'll have to set your camera to take a lot of shots in quick succession, so that you can adequately capture the movement of your subject to fill out the right number of stopped frames it takes to make a good time-lapse video — which is quite a few we've got to say.
You'll have to consult your camera handbooks for how best to do that, but once you have done it, simply load them into Windows Live Movie Maker. Then set the photo duration to “.03” seconds for each photo (you can do that quickly by selecting all of the photos at once before changing the duration), and you've got yourself a time-lapse video!
How it works