How to publish and share Windows Movie Maker Videos with SkyDrive

Windows Live Movie Maker 2011 makes it easy to create photo slideshows and home movies in seconds. Your SkyDrive makes it easy to publish and share your movies. Friends, family and anyone else who has permission to view your SkyDrive will be able to view, play and share your Windows Live Movie Maker 2011 movies directly from their web browsers. In this tutorial, I’ll show how to upload a Windows Live Movie Maker 2011 video and share it with your contacts.

Uploading to Your Windows Live SkyDrive

Open a Windows Live Movie Maker 2011 project or create a new one. Next, click the Home tab and locate the Share section. Click the SkyDrive button found in this section.

Next, you’ll see a prompt asking you to choose a resolution for your movie. This is becauseSkyDrive imposes a strict file size limit of 100 MB. If your movie file is larger than 100 MB, it will be rejected. To avoid this, choose one of the suggested resolutions. You can see the estimated file size below the resolutions. Choose the highest resolution without exceeding an estimated file size of 100 MB. In this example, the recommended setting of 640 x 480 is best.

If you aren’t already, you’ll be asked to sign in to your Windows Live/Microsoft account. If you don’t have one, get one here.

In the next window, you’ll need to choose an album in your SkyDrive where you’ll upload your movie. If you haven’t created any albums yet, you’ll have the opportunity to create a new one. To do so, click "New album title."

Type in a name for your album and then choose your sharing preferences in the drop-down menu below. You can change these later. Choose from:

• Everyone (public)
• My friends and their friends
• Friends
• Some friends
• Me

These are all pretty self-explanatory, except for the last two. "Some friends" makes the folder available to all of your Windows Live contacts, except for the ones you’ve designated for limited access. For more information on limited access in Windows Live, see this blog post from the Windows Live team. The "Me" setting is equivalent to private--only those with a link can view it (more on this later). For all these settings, other than the Everyone (public), users will have to be logged in to your Windows Live account in order to view your files.

After your choose your album, click Publish. Windows Live Movie Maker 2011 will upload your file.

When it’s done, you’ll have the option to view it online. Click "Watch Online" to open the video in your default web browser.

In this screen, you can see the contents of the folder we just created.

Click on your video’s thumbnail to view it in an embedded player.

To return to your SkyDrive later, visit http://skydrive.live.com.

Sharing Your Video

There are two ways to share a video from your SkyDrive folder. You can embed it, or you can send someone a link. You can get the code and/or link by viewing the video in your SkyDrive and copying and pasting it from the section in the bottom-right.

To share the link, copy and paste the entire URL contained in the Web address field.

The second line of code is an embed code. You can copy and paste this into the source of your blog or web page to display the video in an embedded player. In order for the embed code to appear, the permissions level must be set at Everyone (public).

Editing SkyDrive Access Permissions

Your uploaded videos inherit the permissions settings from the folder that contains them. As I mentioned above, you can change these permissions at any time. To do so, log in to your SkyDriveand navigate to the folder where you’d like to edit the permissions. If you are looking at a video, you’ll have to go up one level (see screenshot).

When viewing a SkyDrive folder, you’ll see a line that reads "Shared with" followed by your current permissions settings. In this example, it reads Everyone (public).

Click this link to change the permissions for the folder.

In the next window, you’ll see an explanation of your current permissions settings. To change them, click ’Edit permissions’.

Move the slider to change the permissions settings. You can also share the folder with people who are not in your Windows Live contacts by entering their email addresses in the field at the bottom. Click "Save" when you are done.

Conclusion

SkyDrive doubles as a place to store your Windows Live Movie Maker 2011 videos and a platform for sharing your work. You’ll get the most mileage if you have a lot of Windows Live contacts, but you can still use your SkyDrive to share with those who don’t have Live IDs. Personally, I feel thatSkyDrive gives you a bit more control than sites like YouTube. Microsoft seems to have less privacy issues than Google has had in the past, for what it’s worth. For more information onWindows Live Movie Maker 2011,

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Adding Animations & Visual Effects in Windows Live Movie Maker.

Windows Live Movie Maker 2011 lets you easily create photo slideshows and home movies without any technical knowledge. You can give them a more professional look and feel by adding transitions, pan and zoom and other visual effects. In this tutorial, we will explain the differences between each of these animations and effects and show you how to use them in your Windows Live Movie Maker 2011 project.

Before You Begin

If you are new to Windows Live Movie Maker, you might want to catch up on the basics before beginning this tutorial. Reading these articles will get you up to speed:

• How to Import Photos and Videos into Windows Live Movie Maker 2011
• Editing Video in Windows Live Movie Maker 2011
• Adding Music to Videos in Windows Live Movie Maker 2011

Before completing the next steps, make sure you have a few photos and/or video clips added into a new Windows Live Movie Maker 2011 project. The above tutorials will help if you don’t know where to start.

Animations

The Animations pane contains two different kinds of animations you can add to video clips or photos: Transitions and Pan and zoom.

Transitions - Transitions are applied to the beginning of the selected clip. To apply them, select a photo or video clip and choose a transition from the gallery in the top-left. You can mouse over a transition to preview it.

Once you’ve applied a transition, the clip in the timeline will have a washed-out diagonal region that shows where the transition begins and ends.

You can alter how long the transition takes by altering the Duration to the right of the Transitionsgallery. After applying a transition to a clip or photo, select it and enter a duration between 0.04 and 10.00 seconds. The washed-out region will shorten or lengthen accordingly.

If you want to apply the same transition to all of you clips and photos, you can click Apply All after selecting a transition. This, however, is a surefire recipe for a repetitive video or slideshow.

One other thing about transitions: you can’t add a transition to the end of a clip. So, if you want to have a clip fade to black, you have to apply a dissolve transition to the clip immediately after it. A bit of a roundabout way to do things, but it accomplishes the same effect.

Pan and Zoom - On the right-hand side of the Animations tab is the Pan and Zoom gallery. These are applied the same way as transitions. Select a photo, and then choose a pan and zoom setting from the gallery.

When pan and zoom is applied, there will be an icon in the top-left of the clip. You cannot alter the duration of a pan and zoom effect.

As with transitions, you can choose to Apply All with your selected pan and zoom. The best use of this feature is to select Automatic and then Apply All. This will apply a random pan and zoom effect to each photo, which helps change things up a bit.

NOTE: You cannot add pan and zoom effects to video clips. This only works with still photos.

To remove an animation, simply choose None from the respective gallery.

Visual Effects

Visual effects can be applied to still photos and video clips. You can find them in the Visual Effectstab and apply them by choosing a clip and selecting an effect from the gallery.

You can preview the effect in the preview window on the left. The original clip appears as normal in the timeline.

In the Visual Effects tab, you will also find the setting that lets you adjust the Brightness.

You can brighten or darken any clip or photo regardless of any visual effects that have been applied.

One thing that’s unique about visual effects is that you can apply multiple effects to a single clip. To do this, click the arrow to expand the gallery and choose Multiple Effects.

In the Add or Remove Effects dialog, you can choose which effects to apply to your selected clip. To add an effect, highlight it in the “Available effects” menu and click Add. To remove it, select it in the“Displayed effects” column and click Remove.

You can also choose the order in which the effects are applied. Depending on which effects you choose, this may impact how the video is ultimately displayed. Click Apply when you are finished.

Conclusion

That’s about all there is to adding transitions, pan and zoom and visual effects to your Windows Live Movie Maker project. Feel free to experiment with different combinations -- there is no risk of overwriting the original, and you can always remove an effect as easily as you applied it.

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How edit Video in Windows Live Movie Maker?

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.

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How to Add Titles, Captions and Credits in Windows Live Movie Maker?

     A picture’s worth a thousand words--but sometimes, your home movie or photo slideshows can benefit from just a bit more. That’s where titles, captions and credits come in. Windows Live Movie Maker 2011 allows you to add these textual elements in a snap. You can even give them a professional look and feel by tweaking the font and style and adding cinematic effects. In this tutorial, we’ll teach you the differences between titles, captions and credits and when to use each of these.

Here are the definitions for each in a nutshell:

• Titles are standalone clips meant to precede your movie.
• Credits are standalone clips meant to follow your movie.
• Captions are text areas that are superimposed on top of clips or photos.

Windows Live Movie Maker 2011 provides buttons for each of these but, in practice, Titles and Credits clips behave exactly the same, once you move them around on the timeline. You’ll see what I mean once we dive into the details.

Adding Titles Clips in Windows Movie Maker 2011

      All the text clip buttons are tucked away in the Home ribbon to the right of the Snapshot button. The first one is the add Title button. Click it and Windows Live Movie Maker will insert a new Titleclip at the very beginning of your movie.

As soon as you add a Title clip, you’ll be taken to the Format tab.

The first thing you’ll want to do here is change the default text from “My Movie" to something more meaningful to you. If the text isn’t already selected, click it in the Preview window.

In the Format tab, you can format the text as you see fit. If you’ve ever used Word, this should be familiar to you. You can see your changes in the preview window below.

As you’ll notice from the screenshot, I’ve also changed the background color. To do this, click thePaint bucket and choose a color. This can only be done with Title and Credit clips.

You can also change the Transparency by moving the slider. This will be more useful for Captions, which we’ll talk about next.

But before we move on, let’s take a look at changing the duration of the Title clip. This can be a little bit confusing, because there are two durations to deal with: the Video duration and the Text duration.

The Video duration refers to the time that the entire clip is displayed. To change this, you have to first click the Edit tab beneath Video tools. Here, you can specify how long the entire Title clip will be.

The Text duration and start time changes how long the text will appear on the title clip. Normally, the Text duration is equal to or less than the Title/Video clip. If the duration is shorter than theVideo duration, then the text will fade away before the Title clip disappears and transitions to the next clip in your timeline.

You can also bump the start time forward, so that the text appears shortly after the Title clip is displayed.

An easier way to alter the start time is to simply drag and drop the text element on the timeline.

Note that the text item is independent of the Title clip - you can move it to another clip, or have it overlap and spill over to another clip.

Adding Captions in Windows Live Movie Maker

Captions are text elements without a dedicated clip or colored background. Instead, they are applied to existing photos or video clips. The add Caption is on the Home ribbon, just below theTitle button.

Clicking the Caption button will insert a text element wherever the playhead is.

You can edit, format and position your caption just like you did with the text element that was associated with the Title clip.

You can’t, however, set a background color for Captions. That’s because the background of the caption will always be the photo or video clip beneath it.

Adding Credits in Windows Live Movie Maker

The last button in our set is the add Credits button.

Once your Credits clip is on the timeline, it functions exactly the same as a Title clip. The Creditsbutton, however, differs from the Title clip button in that it adds the Credits clip at the very end of your movie and automatically adds preceding text for “Credits," “Director," “Starring," or “Location" based on which option you choose after you click the arrow next to the button.

For example, when you choose Credits, it creates a text element with the word “CREDITS" and a space for you to enter names.

Or, if you choose Director, it inserts “DIRECTED BY" and leaves an area for you to enter your own name.

This text behaves no differently than it would if you would have simply typed it yourself.

Working with Text Effects

Text effects can be applied to Titles, Captions and Credits. Simply select the text element on your timeline and choose an Effect from the gallery in the right-hand section of the Format tab underText Tools.

There are 24 different text effects, from the classic Scroll to the more ornate Cinematic style.

Note that if you choose a Text effect where the text fades in, flies in or is otherwise not visible at the very beginning of the animation, you won’t be able to see it when your playhead is right at the beginning of the text element. This isn’t a bug--simply advance your playhead to see the text, just as it will appear in that point of time in your movie.

You can still edit the text at any point in the timeline, however, and the changes will apply to the entire text element.

Tips and Limitations

While adding Captions, Credits and Titles in Windows Live Movie Maker 2011 is incredibly easy, the feature is somewhat limited. For one, you cannot have more than one text element at any given point in the timeline. This means that you can’t have different two or more text styles in any clip. For example, if you wanted the word “Credits" to appear in bold, but the rest of the text to be in italics or normal font weight, this simply isn’t possible. Also, if you wanted a caption on top of aCredit or Title screen, this is likewise not possible.

On the plus side, you can add as many Title or Credits clips as you want. You can also move them around to anywhere you want in the timeline, including in the middle of your movie. In this way, you can use them to divide sections in your movie.

Also note that you can add transitions from the Animations tab to Title clips, just like you would with normal video clips.

For more information on adding Animations and Visual effects, check out our earlier tutorial: How to Add Animations and Visual Effects in Windows Live Movie Maker 2011.

Conclusion

As you can see, adding a bit of explanatory text to any point in your movie is incredibly easy with Windows Live Movie Maker 2011. While you won’t be able to create advanced call-outs - such as speech bubbles, drawings or text boxes - nor can you include multiple text elements on the same clip, you can add text effects and transitions to them to give them a more professional look and feel. For more tips on jazzing up your photo slideshows and home movies with Windows Live Movie Maker 2011

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