Sharing Your Movies with the World

The whole point of editing a home movie, TV show, or other video is to watch it and, preferably, share it with others. Fortunately, Windows Movie Maker includes a multitude of ways to share your completed videos. All of these options are located in the Publish To section of the Task pane. When you select one of those options, Windows Movie Maker will usually instantiate a version of the Publish Movie wizard, shown in article 12-19. This wizard will guide you through the time of movie publishing you selected. Titles are deleted just like video clips. Select them in the timeline and press Delete, and they’re gone forever. There is one exception.

When you choose DVD from the Publish To portion of the Tasks pane, a new application will launch as described later.

Publishing to the PC If you’d like to save your edited movie as a digital video file that can be viewed on a PC, Media Center PC, a portable media device, or even a PDA, choose the This Computer option. Windows Movie Maker can publish movies to two different formats: AVI (Audio Video Interleave): Very high quality but requires a lot of disk space.

WMV (Windows Media Video): Can be configured for a variety of quality levels and resolutions. If you’re working with a home movie that was shot with a digital camcorder, you should typically save a copy of the edited movie in the AVI format for archival purposes. But the WMV format makes a lot more sense for distribution. In the first phase of the Publish Movie wizard, you’ll be asked to give the movie a name and then choose a location to which to publish it (the Videos folder by default). Then, you can choose the quality level and resolution of the final video, 12-20. In this phase of the wizard, you can choose between Best Quality (which will vary according to the performance characteristics of your PC), a special file size, or you can choose from a wide list of settings. What you see in that third option will depend on which version of Windows Vista you’re using. All versions of Windows Vista support the settings types described in Table 12-2.

If you’re running Windows Vista Home Premium or Ultimate, however, you will see additional HD video modes as well. Note that it doesn’t make much sense to save a low-quality video in HD format. That is, you should only save an edited HD video in an HD format. In Table 12-3, we describe the additional HD formats that Vista Home Premium and Ultimate will see.

You don’t have to be a high school AV geek to understand that bigger and more high quality video types will require more PC processing power and dramatically more storage space, especially HD video. The big question, of course, is which video setting to use? That all depends, of course, on your source video. For a general rule of thumb, be sure to save your edited video in a format that is equivalent to, or of lower quality, than the original video. Otherwise, you’re needlessly wasting space. And understand that you can save your edited video multiple times. You can save one version in AVI format for backup purposes, another in WMV DVD quality for viewing on your Media Center PC, and yet another in WMV Low Quality for distribution on the Web. Once you’ve chosen a format, click the Publish button and sit back and wait. It takes enormous amounts of time to publish video to the hard drive, especially when you’re working with HD content.

Publishing to DVD or CD

If you want to publish your edited movie directly to DVD, Windows Movie Maker will prompt you to save the project (which we discuss later in the article) and will then open Windows DVD Maker, which we discuss later in this article. Publishing to recordable CD is another story. Whereas a typical recordable DVD has space for 4.7 GB or 9.4 GB of storage space (or 1 or 2 hours of digital video, respectively), most CDs only contain about 700 MB of storage space. Thus, the quality of the resulting video will generally not be as high as is possible with a true DVD movie, unless the edited video is very short. There’s another difference.

Video CDs are not the same as DVDs: Instead of creating a standard DVD movie disc that can play in any DVD player or PC, when you create a movie CD, you’re essentially copying a digital video to a CD, so you can choose between the same video settings we discussed in the previous section. The resulting disc will play on some DVD players, but should work on most PCs.

Publishing for E-mail Distribution If you’d like to send your edited video to others via e-mail, Windows Movie Maker assumes that the resulting file should occupy 10 MB or less of disk space so that it will be delivered properly by most e-mail services. You can change the size as you’d like, but be careful not to send large attachments via e-mail, as many will simply not be delivered, and even if they are, large attachments can slow down e-mail clients on either side of the conversation. When you choose to publish your movie with the E-mail link, the Publish Movie wizard is basically providing you with a limited version of the This Computer\Publish type, where only a range of file sizes is available. You could achieve the same results by choosing This Computer, Compress To, and 10 MB in the wizard. Writing Back to a Digital Video Camera If you acquired a home movie via digital video camera, or have a digital video camera lying around, it makes sense to copy a perfect digital version of your edited video back to tape. Why? Well, in addition to providing you with a perfect backup of your movie, using a video tape for this purpose will save disk space. To do so, simply insert a blank video tape into your camcorder, connect the camera to the PC via a FireWire (IEEE 1394) cable, and start the wizard. Note that publishing a movie to digital video in this fashion can be quite slow: It will require 1 minute of copying time for every 1 minute of edited video.

Saving and Working with Projects Before moving on to the wonderful world of DVD movies, we should make one final point about Windows Movie Maker. Each time you copy material into the timeline or storyboard and begin editing it, you should save your progress as a Windows Movie Maker project. That way you can come back later, as you would with an unfinished Word document, and make additional changes.

To save a Windows Movie Maker project, simply choose Save Project from the File menu.

By default, projects are saved to your Videos folder, but you’re free to save them wherever you’d like. You can reopen saved projects at any time, naturally enough, by selecting File and then Open Project. A Windows Movie Maker project is only basically just a file that points to the various digital media files you’re accessing, along with whatever edits, transitions, effects, and titles you’ve made in the timeline or storyboard. The project does not contain any videos, photos, music files, or other content. If you move these files around in the file system or delete them, Windows Movie Maker will not be able to use them in a saved project later.

Using Windows DVD Maker

Windows Vista, for the first time, includes an application for burning, or making, DVD movies. As you might expect from a first effort, Windows DVD Maker isn’t a terribly sophisticated application, so the quality and variety of DVD movies you can make are fairly limited. On the plus side, DVD Maker does deliver the most commonly wanted DVD-making features, and, as you might expect, it’s especially well-suited for beginners. So if you’ve never made a DVD movie, take heart. This is a great place to begin. DVD Maker is only available to users of Windows Vista Home Premium and Windows Vista Ultimate. If you have a different Vista version, you will need to upgrade to one of these versions in order to use Windows DVD Maker. Or, you could purchase one of the many third-party DVD maker applications on the market. Note that any third-party package will be more sophisticated, but also more complex, than Windows DVD Maker. There are actually several ways to start DVD Maker. • From within Windows Photo Gallery, you can select a group of photos or videos and then select Burn and then Video DVD from the toolbar. • From within Windows Movie Maker, you can choose DVD from the Publish To portion of the Tasks pane. • If you saved a DVD Maker project previously, you can double-click that project’s icon in the shell and pick up where you left off. • Or, you can simply find Windows DVD Maker in the Windows Vista Start Menu and launch the application manually, and then add content to an empty project as you go. Since the latter approach will gain you the skills necessary to explore the other options, we’ll examine Windows DVD Maker as a standalone application here. But its integration with Windows Photo Gallery and Windows Movie Maker can and should be explored as well.

To start Windows DVD Maker, open the Start Menu and locate the Windows DVD Maker shortcut in the All Programs group. Windows DVD Maker is a simple wizard-based application, 12-21, which steps you through the process of adding content and menus to your eventual DVD movie.

Like Windows Movie Maker, Windows DVD Maker works with something called a project, that is, a file you can save and reload later that describes the DVD you’re making. Unlike Windows Movie Maker, there is no obvious way to save a project while you’re compiling your DVD. However, if you look close, you’ll see a single menu item, File, in most of the Windows DVD Maker screens. When you click this menu, you’ll see options for saving, loading, and making new projects. You can also save your project by clicking the more prominent Cancel button. This will close Windows

DVD Maker, but the application will prompt you to save the current project first.

Adding Photos and Videos to Your DVD Project As noted previously, Windows DVD Maker is a wizard-based application in which you move through a limited set of steps and end up, hopefully, with a nice-looking DVD movie that will play on virtually any DVD player. In the first step of the wizard, you add the content you’d like on the DVD. This content consists of pictures and video. You can drag items to the DVD Maker application using your standard drag and drop skills. Or, you can click the Add Items button, next to the File menu, to display a standard Vista File Open dialog. Use this dialog to navigate to the content you’d like on your DVD movie. When you add videos to a Windows DVD Maker project, they appear in the wizard as you might expect. Pictures are a little different. If you drag one or more image files into Windows DVD Maker, the application will create a folder called Slide Show 12-22. From this point on, any photos you add to the project will be added to this one folder. And they will be displayed as an animated slide show in the finished DVD. You can’t have two or more photo slide shows on a single DVD. Only one is allowed. You also cannot add videos to the Slide show folder. If you try to add a video, it will be added to the root of the project instead.

To remove a video, picture, or the Slide show folder, select it in Windows DVD Maker and click the Remove Items button. Alternatively, click Delete or right-click the item and choose Remove.

About DVD Storage Issues and Formats One issue you should be concerned about is how much content will fit on the DVD. Windows DVD Maker works with standard recordable DVDs, so the storage capacities are based on the media you use. With a standard single-layer recordable DVD, you can have up to 60 minutes of video. With a standard dual-layer recordable DVD, you can store up to 120 minutes of video.

Another issue, of course, is that there are several recordable DVD types out there. To create a DVD movie that will work in virtually any DVD player in the world, use writeonce DVD-R or DVD+R media. Both work well, though DVD-R seems to have better compatibility with older DVD players if that’s an issue. Avoid rewriteable DVD formats, like DVD+RW or DVD-RW, because they won’t work with most standalone DVD players (though they’re fine for testing and PC-based use). If you see the acronym DL used, that describes dual-layer, a technology that doubles the capacity of a recordable DVD’s storage space. Note that you might also be confined by the capabilities of your DVD writer. If your hardware is only compatible with, say, DVD+R, then obviously you will need to use DVD+R recordable disks. But if you have a multiformat DVD writer, it’s your choice.

Arranging Content When you’ve added two or more items to your Windows DVD Maker project, you can start thinking about the order in which they will appear on the final DVD movie. While DVD Maker doesn’t offer a huge selection of DVD menu layout choices, it does let you reorder items. You’ll notice that the list of videos and photo slide shows in the wizard has an explicit order, as noted by the Order column heading. You can easily reorder items in the following ways:

Drag and drop: Using the skills you’ve no doubt honed over the years in Windows, simply grab an item in the list and drag it to the position in the order you’d like it to appear.

Move up and Move down buttons: In the Windows DVD Maker toolbar, there are two arrow-shaped buttons, Move up and Move down, that will enable you to reorder the selected item as indicated. This is shown in article 12-24.

Right-click method: You can also right-click any item and choose Move Up or Move Down from the resulting pop-up menu.

Previewing Content If you’d like to play a video or preview a photo that’s in your DVD Maker project, simply double-click that item. Videos play back in Windows Media Player by default, while photos are previewed in Windows Photo Gallery. Note that you cannot play the Slide show folder. You can only open the folder and view the files inside. Naming Your DVD Movie Under the content list of this window, you’ll see a small and easily missed text box called Disc title. By default, it’s set to the current date in M/D/YEAR format, where M is a one- or two-number representation of the month (1), D is a one- or two-number representation of the day (30), and YEAR is a four-number representation of the year (2007). You will want to change this title to something descriptive, because it will be used on the DVD’s menu as the title of the DVD movie. A home movie DVD, for example, might be called Our Summer Vacation or similar.

Understanding DVD Movie Options In keeping with the user interface minimalism of Windows DVD Maker, you access the application’s DVD Options dialog box via a small Options link in the lower-right corner of its window (and not via a Tools -> Options menu as you might expect). When you click this link, the DVD Options dialog box opens, 12-25. Note that these options are related to the DVD you’re creating and not to the Windows DVD Maker application per se. You can pick whatever title you want, but only 32 characters are allowed.

The following options are available: DVD playback settings: You can configure your DVD movie to play its content in one of three ways:

• Start with DVD menu: Indicates that your DVD will behave like a typical Hollywood DVD and will display a DVD menu on first start.

• Play video and end with DVD menu: Causes the DVD movie to play through the DVD content first and then display the menu only after the content is complete.

• Play video in a continuous loop: Simply plays the DVD content repeatedly, in a loop. Users will still be able to access the DVD menu, however, by pressing the Menu button on their DVD remote control or player.

DVD aspect ratio: Enables you to configure whether the DVD’s video playback and menu display in a narrow 4:3 aspect ratio (which is not really square per se) or in widescreen 16:9 aspect ratio. The choice you make here should be based on the aspect ratio of the screen on which you think the DVD will be accessed, and on the aspect ratio of the content you’re using. Today, most video content is created in a 4:3 aspect ratio. But many television sets are now widescreen. The choice is yours, and you can certainly make a version of the DVD in both formats, though that will be time consuming.

Video format: Enables you to choose whether the DVD will be created in the NTSC or PAL video format. You should choose the format that is used in your locale. For example, the NTSC format is correct for the United States, but PAL is used in countries like France and the United Kingdom.

Other DVD settings: In the bottom of the DVD Options dialog box, you can set options for the DVD burner speed and the location at which the application will store its temporary files during the DVD creation process. Typically, you will want to leave the DVD burner speed at the fastest setting, but if you run into problems burning DVDs, you can change it to a slower speed (such as medium or slow). This will increase the amount of time it will take to create your DVD movie but will result in a more reliable burn experience. Too, most will want to leave the temporary file location setting untouched. However, if one of your hard drives is faster or has much more space available, you can use this setting to change the location where temporary files are stored and, possibly, speed up the DVD creation process. You will need a hard drive or partition with at least 5 GB of free space in order to create a single-sided DVD movie. Dual-layer (DL) DVDs require at least 10 GB of hard drive space. Do not attempt to create a DVD movie on a hard disk that is slower than 5400 RPM. Faster drives - 7800 RPM and 10,000 RPM, for example - running on modern hard drive interfaces (SATA, or Serial-ATA, instead of IDE/ATA, for example) will get better results.

Working with DVD Menus After you’ve selected the content that will be included on the DVD movie and have set the DVD options, you can move on to the next step in the Windows DVD Maker wizard and select a menu style. 12-26, this second and final step in the wizard can be skipped altogether if you like the default menu style: Simply click Burn and off you go.

When you click the Next button to move to the second phase of the DVD Maker wizard, you will notice that there is no corresponding Back button. That’s because Windows DVD Maker adheres to the silly new Windows Vista application style: A graphical Back button is illogically located in the upper-left corner of the application window. It resembles the Back button in Internet Explorer (that is, it’s a blue arrow). Why it’s not next to a similar Next button is quite unclear. It makes sense to spend a bit of time here and experiment with the built-in menu styles, since you might not be too excited by the default choice. Besides, there are a number of other things you can do here, including previewing the DVD, changing the menu text, customizing the menu, and adding music to and changing options for the photo slide show. We’ll look at those options in the next section. Along the right side of the application window, you will see a list of menu styles, each presented with a visual thumbnail to give you a rough idea of how it will appear in your DVD. Windows DVD Maker comes with roughly 20 DVD menu styles, and if the application proves a hit with users, one might expect enterprising third-party developers to come up with more.

Each menu style is different. Some offer an animated video preview running behind the menu text, while others offer multiple video previews, running simultaneously, or even animated menu text that flies in from the sides of the screen.

Changing Other DVD Options To fully configure your DVD movie, and appreciate what effect the various DVD menu choices will have on the finished product, you’ll need to preview the movie and access the other options that are available in this step of the wizard.

Previewing the DVD Movie Even if you don’t think you’ll need to make any changes, you should always preview your DVD before committing it to disc. You do so by clicking the Preview toolbar button, which brings up a Preview Your Disc view with a virtual DVD player, complete with DVD controls such as Menu, Play, Pause, and so on. This is shown in article 12-28. Here, you might discover that the font used for the menu text is ugly, you made a bad decision about how the menu comes up, or you might want to change to a different menu style all together. To make any changes, click OK (or the Back button) and get back to work.

And yes, you can also go back from the Ready to Burn Disc phase to the first step of the DVD Maker wizard. The application will remember the settings you configured regardless of which direction you go in the user interface. Each scene in the DVD menu correlates to a video or photo slide show you imported into the Windows DVD Movie Maker project.

Changing the Menu Text change a variety of options related to the DVD menu text, click the Menu Text button. Here, 12-29, you can change the font (including color and bold and italic attributes, but not, curiously, the size), the disc title, the text used for the Play, Scenes, and Notes links, and you can write a block of Notes text that will appear on a subpage of the main DVD menu.

By default, the Notes link and corresponding Notes text will not appear. You have to add the text first. You can add up to 256 characters in the Notes block. The previews on the right side of the window will show you what the optional Notes page will look like, and of course, you can also see it in the DVD preview described previously.

Customizing the Menu To customize the appearance of the DVD menu, click the Customize Menu toolbar button. Curiously, you can change some font properties here again, duplicating the functionality of the menu text options described in the previous section. However, the rest of the disc menu options shown here are unique, as seen in article 12-30. You can change the videos that display in the foreground and background (the layout and appearance of which vary from menu style to menu style), the audio that plays over the menu (its silent by default), and the style of the menu links, or buttons. The video and audio used in the DVD menu don’t even have to be related to the media files you chose for inclusion in the DVD movie itself. For example, you could select two movies and a photo slide show for the DVD itself, and separate third and fourth movies for the title if you want.

f you make enough changes, or want to reuse the customizations you made, you can actually save them as a brand-new style. When you do this, a new entry called Custom Styles is added to the drop-down above the list of menu styles in the right of the application window. Now, you can choose between Menu Styles and Custom Styles.

Configuring the Photo Slide Show If you’ve included a photo slide show in your DVD movie, you can customize it by clicking the Slide Show button in the DVD Maker toolbar. In the Change Your Slide Show Settings window, shown in article 12-31, you can add one or more songs (music files) to the slide show, alter the length of time each photo displays, choose a transition type (cross fade is the default), and decide whether to use pan and zoom effects, which will provide a nice animation effect. Adding music and animation effects to a photo slide show dramatically improves its effectiveness, so spend some time playing around with these options.

Writing the Movie to Disc When you’re satisfied with the DVD movie, it’s time to burn it to disc. Click the Burn button to proceed. If there is no writeable DVD in the drive, Windows DVD Maker will prompt you to insert one. You should use the lowest capacity disc possible (4.7 GB for one hour or less of video), since those discs tend to be less expensive than the dual-layer versions. If your PC does not have a DVD burner, Windows DVD Maker will tell you that a DVD burner is required and recommend that you connect one before continuing. Optionally, you could save the project instead and install a DVD burner later. What you can’t do easily is copy the DVD Maker project to a different PC with a DVD burner and then create the DVD there. The reason is that the project will look for the content needed to create the DVD in file paths relative to where they were on the original PC. In order to make this work, you would have to copy the content for the project to the same locations on the second PC as they were on the first. After you’re inserted a blank recordable DVD in the drive, DVD Maker will begin the creation process. This can be a lengthy process, depending on the amount of content you’ve included. While DVD Maker is creating the DVD, the application window closes and a small Burning dialog appears in the lower-right corner of your screen, 12-32, charting its progress.

When the DVD is completed, Windows DVD Maker ejects the DVD drive tray so you can go try it in a DVD player. You’re also prompted to create another copy of the disc if you’d like. Click Close to cancel that choice and return to the main DVD Maker application.

Summary The digital video capabilities in Windows Vista are vastly superior to those offered in Windows XP. You can manage your digital movie collection in a variety of ways, including the Windows shell, Windows Photo Gallery, Windows Media Player, and Windows Media Center. You can use Windows Movie Maker to edit and distribute your home movies, recorded TV shows, and other video-related content, including HD content, and can output the results in HD-compatible glory if you’re so inclined. Using Windows DVD Maker, you can even publish movies and photo slide shows to standard DVD movies that will work in virtually any DVD player in the world.