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Working with the Timeline

First, you’re going to want to put Windows Movie Maker in Timeline mode. To do so, click the Storyboard button in the upper-left corner of the Storyboard pane and choose Timeline from the drop-down menu that appears. Movie Maker will now resemble article 12-11.

Drag the Recorded TV show (or movie) you want to edit from the Imported Media pane down into the timeline. When you do so, Movie Maker will now resemble article 12-12.

If you’re editing a recorded TV show, the first step is to remove the unrelated content at the beginning of the show. Press the Play button to play through this content and find the beginning of the bits you’d like to save. You can skip ahead, pause, and rewind to the beginning of the timeline as required. After you’ve found the exact moment at which the actual show begins, click Pause. If you can, try to make this pause point occur right when the image fades to black or just a hair before the actual video starts. Now, click the Split button, which is located just below the video preview in the Preview pane. This will create a break point in the video, 12-13, effectively dividing the video portion of the timeline into two sections.

To trim this off the video, select the first segment of video, which will highlight in white, and click Delete. When you do so, the remainder of the video - the clip that was to the right of the split or break point - will slide left so that it starts at the beginning of the timeline. Now, you can trim the end of the TV show or video. Using the blue pill in the scrubber bar below the video preview, move forward through the remaining video until you can pinpoint where you’d like the ending to be (  12-14). As before, use the Split button to trim off the end of the video. Then, select this ending video clip in the timeline and click Delete to remove it from the timeline.

To remove commercials from recorded TV shows, use a similar technique to locate the beginning and end of each commercial block and then remove that clip from the timeline. It may take a bit of time, but you can certainly remove any extraneous video you want with just a little effort. You can also combine two separate video clips if you’d like to work with them as a single unit. To do so, select the first clip. Then, while holding down Ctrl key, select the second clip. Now, choose Combine from the Clip menu. For this to work, both clips must be right next to each other.

Adding Transitions and Effects

When you make hard video cuts like those described in the preceding section, the resulting video may feature sudden and jarring jumps between the clips in the timeline. You can smooth out these jumps using transitions and effects. Indeed, the simplest effects are so commonly used that they’re built right into the Windows Movie Maker timeline: Just right-click the video in your timeline and choose Fade In to make the beginning of the video a bit more visually smooth. Then, right-click and choose Fade Out to do the same for the ending. If you want to smooth the transitions between clips where you exorcised commercials in recorded TV shows, you can likewise use only the timeline. Just drag one video clip over an adjoining video clip, 12-15, to make them smoothly transition into each other. In some cases, however, you might want to use more intricate transitions.

For this purpose, Windows Movie Maker includes a huge collection of video transitions that are inspired by the transitions we see every day in TV shows and movies. To access these transitions, click the Transitions link in the Edit portion of the Task pane.

To add a transition to your video, locate a split between two video clips in the timeline. Then, find the transition you want in the Transitions pane and drag it down to the timeline, into the split between the two clips you just located. You can preview transitions by double-clicking the icons in the Transitions pane. When you add a transition to the timeline, it appears in the Transition well below the video. To remove a transition, right-click it and choose Remove. You can also add special effects to your videos, although these too should be used with care. Video effects range from blurring, brightness changes, and various fades to color and hue changes and zooms. To see which effects are available to you, select the Effects link in the Edit portion of the Tasks pane, 12-17.

Unlike transitions, effects are added directly to a video clip, not between video clips. So pick the effect you want - after double-clicking it to preview it - and then drag it to a video clip in the timeline. Preview your changes in the Preview pane. When you add an effect to a video clip, you’ll see a small gray star icon appear on the clip. Unfortunately, it’s not as easy to remove an effect as it is to remove a transition. Basically, it just involves an extra step, because you can apply more than one effect to any video clip. Technically, you can even reapply multiple copies of an effect to any video clip. So, for example, if you added the Sharpen effect to a clip but found that it wasn’t quite sharp enough, you could add it again to make it even sharper. To remove an effect, right-click the clip in question and choose Effects. Then, in the resulting Add or Remove Effects dialog, select the effect or effects you don’t want and then click the Remove button. Voilà. Adding Titles Finally, you can add titles to your video. Titles are typically added at the beginning or end (where they’re often called credits) of many movies, but you can also add titles through a movie as needed. For example, if you edited a movie of your vacation to Hawaii, you could add titles at various points to describe where each scene occurred. As with transitions and effects, you want to balance your use of titles so that they don’t overpower the movie. To add a title to the beginning of your movie, click the Titles and Credits link in the Edit portion of the Task pane. This option behaves differently than most Movie Maker tasks. 12-18, the application switches into a unique Titles and Credits mode, where you can add titles at the beginning of the movie, before the selected clip, or on the selected clip. You can also choose to add credits at the end. Pick Title at the beginning. Then, enter the title you’d like to use into the provided text boxes. As you type, the titles you enter will be previewed in the video preview window. You can use the supplied links to change the way the title is animated - again, be careful there - or the fonts used to display the title. When you’re done, click Add Title and the title will be added before the beginning of the video in the timeline. Click Play to watch your masterpiece. At this point, you can add a transition between the title and the beginning of the video, delete the title and choose a nicer title type that is overlayed directly on the video, or add end credits. Experiment and have fun.