schmitty34

So I made my first edit with footage from my Countour in Windows Live Movie Maker. I've used movie maker before (older version) with footage from a standard video camera with no problem so I used it for my snowboarding footage without hesitation.

Well, after a few hours of editing a whole days worth of footage into a 10 minute video, Windows Live Movie Maker wont save it as a movie file. The project saves fine as a MM project file, but when I try to save it as a movie it goes really slow and eventualy freezes as 70%. I've tried lower quality settings and all it does is get to 70% faster and then freeze. My computer is pretty new so I should have plenty of RAM.

Anyone else use Windows Live MM for their edits? Anyone have similar issues?

If I can't figure this out, I've wasted a few hours of my life and then will need to find another editing program to start over

ETM

I am no tech guru but windows movie maker does not work well with mp4 files. It strips the quality right back for some reason. You really need a better program if using mp4 files.

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firstx1017

All I use is Windows Movie Make with our Go Pro. However, what version of computer are you using? As ETM says, MP4's can be problems. With Windows Vista you have to download the correct codecs for everything to run correctly. We tried several and on two different computers with Windows Vista we still had problems but it was possible. We finally got new laptops with Windows 7 and they have all the codecs needed for the HD Go Pro movies we have and I've been using it. I was having problems where after I edited my movie and wanted to publish it - it would freeze when it was 70% complete. I found that if you have a lot of splits in the movie and transitions, etc. it is harder to publish. I would break it up into 4-5 minutes video sections and create a movie titled part 1, part 2, etc. and then import them in to make one video - especially if you are making 10-15 minute videos. When I did this and tried to publish I didn't have any problems with it freezing up and never publish the movie.

When you publish if you publish in HD it takes longer to create the movie, but all my movies are .WMV movies when I publish the movie. We finally created a "custom" setup using 1280 x 860 for the final movie and the quality is still great.

Good luck!
Vicki

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I learned to snowboard at 50! woo hoo!

cdrakep

Adobe premier is great, this is my first video ever with it, took about two hours...



Figured out how to speed up, slow down, cut different scenes in that time..

Edit : That was originally 11 minutes of footage before editing.

firstx1017

The other problem I would have is it would say the the video clip was corrupted and would have a yellow "!" over it - when it wasn't. This drove me crazy for about two weeks trying to read up on what the problem was. End result was either you have to have a plain video with no transitions, not small clip sections, no music, etc. - or if you want all that fancy stuff then you need to create small video clips.

Example - our movie of our trip to Copper Mountain. I split the sections up to us at the Airport, on the plane, take off, landing, etc. and created one movie part 1 and published it. Then part 2 was the video of the resort, our room, the eateries - us walking around, etc. That was part 2. Then I created a video of our first day snowboarding as part 3. Another video of the 2nd day boarding. Another video of our 3rd day boarding. Then the last video of us leaving, etc. I named all these videos and published them, etc. If you are adding music that is another problem why things can freeze. When I had all the sections created then I started a new movie and brought the published videos in and then added my title and credits and then published it and no longer had the problem of it freezing.

Again, it is all the transitions, and captions, music, etc. that will cause it to freeze if you try to do it as one whole 10 minute video. Believe me - I spent two full weeks trying everything and this is the conclusion I came up with after reading for help on the internet.

Vicki

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I learned to snowboard at 50! woo hoo!

david_z

If these pieces of advice don't work here is (potentially) another avenue to troubleshoot. I don't use MM anymore but I use Corel Visual Studio Pro X3 and there is a problem where I cannot export movie files, either.

Turns out, if you have the most recent version of Quicktime installed, it is not compatible with Corel and tihs incompatibiility causes the glitch which barfs your movie. Roll back to an older version of QT and that fixes the problem I had in Corel.

Could be a similar problem, could be a similar solution.

Just my $0.02.

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surferbum21

what song is that?

TorpedoVegas

I like Sony Vegas. You can download a full functioning demo from their website and see if it works for you. I've tried Premier as well and it is also a good choice.

poutanen

As another mentioned make sure you've got the latest codecs. Download the K-lite codec pack (standard will do fine) and try again. Shouldn't be a problem with windows MM.

For another solution, go to sourceforge and see if there's a good open source video editor. I'm sure there is...

schmitty34

I'll try what you suggested with splitting the movies. The current project is 10 minutes with a ton of splits and transitions and three different songs. There are a lot of source files and all are pretty big since they were shot with high res from two different Contours.

I'll see if splitting helps.

It's not ideal, but it may work. Thanks for the advice!

Once I get back home i am also going to check the file types of the source files. I think the footage my friend gave me was .mov which may be causing problems as well because the project did seem to lag more after I added a few of his clips.

thanks for the thoughts everyone!