There Will Be No Windows Movie Maker In Windows 7

Windows Movie Maker is a basic video creating/editing software included in Microsoft Windows. Windows Me was the first version to include Windows Movie Maker. Then the Windows XP, Windows Vista all have Windows Movie Maker in them. But it's not in Windows 7.

So what does it mean to the Movie Maker users? We need to download and install one or two versions of Window Movie Maker, along with Photo Story 3, and continue making movies.

One of the obvious way to get Movie Maker is to download the Windows LIve Suite and include the Windows LIve Movie Maker option. That gets you the newest version from Microsoft, but considerably slimmed down in features from the MM2.1 in XP or MM6 in Vista. It is still possible to run any version of Windows Movie Maker by simply copying the original Movie Maker files from a previous version of Windows into Windows 7. This method works for all versions of Windows Movie Maker including the Windows Vista version if your hardware supports it.

There are 5 versions of movie maker you could add to the Windows 7. You could add Microsoft's Windows Live Movie Maker, Movie Maker 2.6 and Photo Story 3 to the clean slate. Since that article I mentioned above MM1, MM2.1 and MM6 from XP and Vista, and they all work to some extent.

Windows Live Movie Maker

This one is the future of Windows Movie Maker. It's intended for Vista and Windows 7 users. See this article and series for more info.
Windows Live Movie Maker

Windows Movie Maker 2.6
Many Vista users had issues with Movie Maker because of their graphics card. To help them, Microsoft stripped down version 2.1, the flagship latest version of Movie Maker in XP, and produced version 2.6. It's a free download from Microsoft and the installation works in Windows 7 in addition to Vista. Here's the link to get it.
Movie Maker 2.6

Windows Movie Maker 1
This is the first version of Movie Maker, one without special effects and transitions. It was included in Windows Me and the first release of XP.
It'll work but not handle video clips until you register wmmfilt.dll. So it is not really useful for us.

Movie Maker 2.1
It's the latest version for that system and one that supports all kinds of 3rd party and user tweaks of effects, transitions and title overlays.
Take your thumb drive to your computer running XP SP2 or later, go to the Movie Maker program folder and copy it with its sub-folders. Then put it in a folder of your choice in Windows 7.
It'll work but as with MM1 not have all features unless you register some DLLs: wmm2ae.dll, wmm2dvr.dll (if you have it), wmm2ext.dll, wmm2filt.dll, wmm2fxa.dll, and wmm2fxb.dll.

Movie Maker 6.0
Movie Maker 6.0 is the version of Movie Maker in all versions of Vista. I copied the folder with it's sub-folders from my Vista Home Basic laptop.
For this version, you should register wmm2ae.dll, wmm2clip.dll, wmm2ext.dll, and wmm2filt.dll.
Registering DLLs in Windows 7 can get a bit tricky as you need admin privileges.... if you're not confident in what you're doing, seek help. I'm still studying the process.

How To Convert Videos To AVI For Windows Movie Maker
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How To Put Videos On iPod Freely?

How To Convert Videos To AVI For Windows Movie Maker

In the last blog, I wrote about how to join video clips together. And I mentioned we can use Windows Movie Maker to do the combination. But we know WMM can only accept AVI and WMV video format. So if you want to edit the videos in Windows Movie Maker, you can convert the videos to AVI format. AVI is a good choice for editting videos, because it can give better quality. And AVI is a old format developed by Microsoft Company, so it can be supported well in Windows.

I have mentioned Leawo in my last blog too. It has produced some good free video converters. This time we will use Leawo Free AVI Converter to convert videos for Windows Movie Maker. It is a clean and free AVI converter which can convert videos to AVI from most popular format like WMV, MOV, MP4, 3GP, 3G2, MPEG, DV etc.

It can support batch mode and can merge several videos into one files too. So if you have more than one video to deal with, this function will be really helpful.

Now let's start to convert videos to AVI for Windows Movie Maker.

step 1,

Open the program of course. You can see it has a laconic interface here. It is a easy to use tool.


step 2,

Add video files. Click "Add" to browse in your video. Find the videos you need to convert. Or you can just drag and drop your video onto this converter. Your video will appear in the file list. And you can add more than one videos once.

step 3,

Customize effects. (This function is only allowed to the pro version!)
Click “Customize” to open the “Customize” window. Then you can customize the output audio and video:

Effect: Adjust the video effect for a better visual effect. Simply drag the slides of "Brightness", "Contrast" and Audio "Volume". "Flip" is to turn the video upside down, while "Deinterlace" is to improve the TV system video effect when playing on computer system.
Trim: Modify the "Start Time"and "End time" with values directly and click "Apply" and then press "OK".
Crop: Select a cropping style in "Letter Box", and do the offset for a precise dimension. Press "OK" to confirm.

step 4,

Setting the output format and output save path.

You can see drop-down button for "Style", "Profile" and "Output". Choose AVI format cause we are converting videos for Windows Movie Maker. And remember to select "AVI With DV Codec" or "Lossless Uncompressed AVI". Not all the AVI videos can be supported by WMM. These two kinds of decoded AVI videos are friendly towords WMM.

last step,

Click the big green start button. Your video will be converted to AVI in a few minutes. Just wait till the process finish, then you can edit your videos in Windows Movie Maker now.

So that is the whole process we convert video to AVI format with Leawo Free Video Converter. There are many other free video converters online, if you got some good idea, please share with me. =]

There Will Be No Windows Movie Maker In Windows 7
How To Put Several Videos together Freely?
How to put videos on iPod freely?