In
our previous tutorials, we introduced you to Windows Live Movie Maker
2011 and showed how to import photos and videos into Windows Live Movie
Maker 2011. The next step is to begin editing your video clips in Windows Live Movie Maker 2011.Windows Live Movie Maker’s video
editing tab lets you split and trim video clips and adjust their
speeds. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to use all of these tools and
functions.
Arranging Clips on the Timeline
When
you import video clips or photos, they are automatically inserted into
the timeline after the clip you currently have selected on the timeline.
You can easily re-arrange the order of the video clips by dragging and dropping them.
Surrounding clips will automatically get shifted on the timeline accordingly. Note that Windows Live Movie Maker 2011 doesn’t
allow any “blank space" on the timeline - every second of the timeline
must be filled by a photo, video, transition or title card.
Likewise, when you remove a clip from the timeline, the surrounding
clips shift to fill the gap left behind and shortening the overall
length of your movie. You can remove clips by right-clicking them and
choosing Remove or by selecting them and pressing Delete on the keyboard.
You can also cut, copy and paste the clips using the corresponding
commands in the contextual menu, or by selecting a clip and pressing CTRL-X, CTRL-C or CTRL-V, respectively.
An even faster way to duplicate clips is to hold CTRL while
dragging and dropping a clip. An exact copy of the clip will be placed
where you release the mouse, and the original clip will remain in place.
Splitting and Trimming Clips
In
addition to re-ordering clips on the timeline, you can also trim them
or split them into separate clips. Both of these tools are on the Edit ribbon.
To
split a clip, position the play cursor at the point where you’d like to
split the clip. To do this, click the long black vertical cursor and
drag it into the middle of a clip.
Or, you can click Play on the preview pane and hit Pause when you reach the point in the clip where you’d like to split it.
Once you have the cursor positioned correctly, click Split.
This creates two separate clips, which you can now re-arrange, trim and apply effects to independently from one another.
There are two ways to trim video clips. The easiest way is to set
the start point and end point. When you set the start point, Windows Live Movie Maker 2011 deletes
the clip footage that precedes the cursor. When you set the end point,
the clip footage after the cursor is removed. To set the start and end
points, position the cursor as you did above and click Set start point or Set end point.
Alternately, you can use the Trim tool. To open it, select a clip and click Trim tool in the Edit ribbon.
You can set the start point and end point either by dragging the
sliders underneath the preview or by entering the times in manually. You
can do multiple trims by clicking Set start point and Set end point. This updates the clip with the new start and end points so you can trim it again. When you’re finished, click Save trim.
If you make a mistake, you can press CTRL-Z to undo or delete the clip and re-import the original and start over.
Unfortunately, there is no easy way to join clips or combine clips in Windows Live Movie Maker 2011.
If you absolutely need this function, you can create a project with the
clips you want to combine and export it as a .WMV and then import it
back into your main project.
Speeding Up or Slowing Down Clips
To change the speed of a clip, select it and choose a speed from the drop-down menu next toSpeed.
Note that when you change the speed of a video clip, Windows Live Movie Maker 2011 removes
the audio from it. This is because the audio’s pitch will be effected
by the change in speed. If you want to retain the audio, you can extract
it using a program like Audacity or AoA Audio Extractor, but when you
add it back in, it will be out of sync. We’ll cover working with audio
in Windows Live Movie Maker 2011 in a later tutorial.
Changing Video Volume
You can alter the volume of each video clip by selecting it and clicking Video volume and
dragging the slider. You can also have the audio fade in or fade out at
three different speeds: slow, medium and fast. Simply choose your fade
in/fade out speed from the drop-down menu in the Audio pane.
