Making Movies and DVD Movies in Windows Vista

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Making Movies and DVD Movies

Just a few short years ago, the notion of consumers using PCs to edit their home movies into professional-looking productions was science-fiction. But then Apple came along with iMovie and proved that it was not just possible but that high-quality video editing tools could be done elegantly and in a user-friendly fashion. At that time, Microsoft had just released its first Windows Movie Maker tool, a crippled Windows Me application that was aimed only at the low end of the market. Today, in Windows Vista, Microsoft has a variety of tools for managing, viewing, editing, and publishing digital video of all kinds. You can even edit TV shows, removing commercials, and make your own movie DVDs. Let’s jump right in.

Managing Digital Movies with Windows Vista

Like Windows XP before it, Windows Vista includes a number of ways in which you can manage, view, and otherwise enjoy digital movies. You may recall that Windows XP included a special shell folder called My Videos. Actually, you will be forgiven for not remembering that - in Windows XP, the My Videos folder was curiously deprecated when compared to its My Documents, My Music, and My Pictures siblings. It didn’t appear on the Start Menu by default and couldn’t be added later. In fact, My Videos didn’t even appear in the shell until you started up Windows Movie Maker for the first time. In Windows Vista, the situation is only marginally different. The My Videos folder has been replaced by the new Videos folder, in keeping with Microsoft’s new shell folder naming scheme. It’s no longer a special shell folder, and it’s not located in the file system inside of Documents, as before. Instead, it sits under your Home folder alongside Documents, Music, Pictures, and other commonly needed folders. But it still doesn’t appear on the right side of Start Menu for some reason, and once again there’s no way to make it appear there. So how do you get to the Videos folder, you ask? In Windows XP, you could simply open My Documents, and there it was. In Vista, the easiest way is to open your Home folder, which is represented by your user name in the upper-right corner of the Start Menu. When you click that link, the Home folder opens in its own window, 12-1. Inside, you’ll see the Videos folder. In addition to Videos, Windows Vista maintains another folder for videos called Public Videos. This was called Shared Videos in Windows XP. Public Videos, as you might expect, is located inside the directory structure for the Public user account and is shared between all of the users configured for the current PC. How do you find it? Sadly, there’s no easy way. You’ll have to manually navigate to C:\Users\Public\Videos (by default) to find this folder.

There’s also a Sample Videos folder that includes a set of short sample videos provided by Microsoft. There is a shortcut to this folder in your Videos folder, but the actual folder is located in C:\Users\Public\Videos\Sample Videos by default. Because of the proliferation of digital cameras with video-taking capabilities, you could very likely also find videos inside of your Pictures folder. When you copy pictures from a digital camera to Windows Vista, any videos on the camera will be copied to the same location, which is typically a subfolder under Pictures. With all these different locations for finding digital videos, you might wonder what Microsoft was thinking. Although we could never claim to offer any insight along those lines, we can tell you that video management, like that of music and photos, has changed dramatically in Windows Vista. Although it’s still possible to navigate around the Windows shell and double-click movies to play them in Windows Media Player or another software tool, Microsoft actually expects that most of its users will instead use dedicated applications to manage and view digital movies. And one of those tools might just surprise you. We look at them all in the next few sections.

Watching and Managing Movies with Windows Photo Gallery The primary movie management tool in Windows Vista, believe it or not, is called Windows Photo Gallery. Why Microsoft didn’t choose to name this as Windows Photo and Movie Gallery is unclear, but the fact remains that you can organize and manage (and even play) all of the digital video on your system with this tool. Although we describe this application in detail in Article 11, it may be worth a short side-trip here to discuss how it works with digital movies specifically. By default, Windows Photo Gallery enables you to manage photos and videos together, and it’s designed to search the Pictures, Videos, Public Pictures, and Public Videos folders for video (and photo) content by default. (You can manually configure Windows Photo Gallery to search other locations as well; see Article 11 for more information.) When it comes to video, all the metadata application information works equally well with movies as it does with photos. That is, you can add tags, rating, and captions to movies, just as you can with photos. If you want to work just with movies in Windows Photo Gallery, select the Videos entry under All Pictures and Videos in the application’s View By pane. Now, you will see just videos in the Thumbnails pane, 12-2.

As you mouse over individual videos, a pop-up window displays, showing a larger thumbnail, along with other information about the file, including its name, size, rating, and the date and time it was created. You can see this effect in article 12-3.

If you want to discover where an individual video is located in the file system, rightclick it in Windows Photo Gallery and choose Open File Location. To play a video, simply double-click it. Curiously, videos opened in Windows Photo Gallery play in . . . Windows Photo Gallery - not Windows Media Player, as you might expect. This is undesirable for a few reasons, but the most obvious is that the video playback window in Windows Photo Gallery is as large as the window, which is often larger than the original video, causing blurry resizing effects. 12-4, Windows Photo Gallery isn’t the optimal place to play video files

. From this window, you can add rating, tags, and captioning metadata if you so desire. What you can’t do is edit the movie - clicking the Fix toolbar button displays an unhelpful message. Our advice is to use Windows Photo Gallery to manage videos only, but to use Windows Media Player 11, described in the next section, for playback. We discuss editing digital movies later in this article as well. You’re wondering whether you can play movies in Windows Media Player from within Windows Photo Gallery, aren’t you? The answer is a qualified yes. To trigger Windows Media Player playback from Windows Photo Gallery, don’t double-click a video thumbnail. Instead, select the video file you’d like to play and then choose Open and then Windows Media Player from the application’s toolbar. The real question, of course, is whether you can make Windows Photo Gallery do this by default. The answer, sadly, is no.

Watching and Managing Movies with Windows Media Player Most people think of Windows Media Player as a music player, but the truth is, Windows Media Player can also work with video and photo content as well. (As we discuss in Article 10, however, Windows Media Player only handles these types of content so that they can be synchronized with portable media players.) This capability isn’t new to Windows Media Player 11, the version that Microsoft ships with Windows Vista. However, because videos do play natively in Windows Media Player 11, it’s possible that you might want to manage videos, to some degree, in the player as well. Like Windows Photo Gallery, Windows Media Player 11 is configured to automatically watch certain folders for digital media files, and those locations include, by default, your Videos and the Public Videos folders. No surprise there. To configure Windows Media Player to display just videos, select Video from the Categories button. 12-5, the display will change to show just video thumbnails.

From here, you can rate individual videos. But that’s about it. You can’t add tags or captions from within Windows Media Player. What you can do, of course, is simply play videos. That’s Windows Media Player’s strong suit, and you can use the player’s various controls to change the size of the video, display it using a nice full-screen mode, or even minimize the player to the system taskbar and watch it there while you get work done. One nice side effect of Windows Media Player’s capabilities is that you can actually create temporary or saved playlists of videos. That way you can trigger a collection of videos to play in order, or randomly. It’s not possible to do that from the shell or within Windows Photo Gallery. And if you save the playlist, you can access it from Windows Media Center, described in the next section.