Microsoft Movie Maker 2

One of the magical secrets Microsoft keeps on its website is Movie Maker.  Not the Movie Maker that comes with Windows XP. No, I speak of Microsoft Movie Maker 2.0. It is outstanding.

Normally, this would be a program I would complain about because it is so well designed, so good that it harms third party competition. But in this case, the third party competition for casual video creation is so terrible, so crummy that one can only imagine that Microsoft, feeling the need for Windows, as a platform, to be competitive in this field, had to roll up their sleeves and to it themselves.

Whereas many of the most popular commercial video editing tools for Windows are gratuitously skinned (usually to look like some sort of DVD player) with controls scattered haphazardly, Movie Maker is a standard Windows program. That means radical concepts like having a menu bar. And a file save item. And other conventional interface concepts that allow users, like me, who have paid for third party video editing tools, to switch to Movie Maker.

In my case, what's really ironic is that I actually did purchase an iMac just to do video editing. Specifically, I have a video camera with a Fire Wire interface. iMovie is pretty decent on the Mac. But Movie Maker 2 makes it even easier. I just hook it up, and choose capture movie and it even offers to put my tape back to the start so I can "fire and forget". When you use Movie Maker, you can really tell that whoever is working on it actually uses this stuff. Someone at Microsoft got ticked off at how time intensive this stuff is and put in a few features that just save on lots of grunt work.

One of the big secrets of Movie Maker though is one that is not well known yet. It's not Movie Maker 2 per se but it's the Windows Media format (WMV). On my Mac, it's a pain to figure out which Quicktime format to use and for some reason, I can never get it to look good and be relatively small. Even if I set something Quicktime to be streamed, it still doesn't necessarily stream but instead wants to be loaded fully.  With WMV, it just streams anyway. I can point someone to a .WMV file and it takes care of everything.  And because they're so small, I can store a lot of home movies on my portable USB drives to make into DVDs later.

There are a few things I would like to see Movie Maker be able to do:

1. Record to DVD. I want to be able to take a collection of WMV files and burn it to DVD to be watched by the family.
2. I want it to be easier to save a .WMV file at the same resolution as the source material. For instance, I use WMV as a quick way to convert .AVI files. Many of my AVIs are at 800x600. But there's no easy way to do that. I have used another program (MS Media Encoder) but it's not quite as clean and simple as Movie Maker is. I just want an option to save something at the same resolution as the original.

That's pretty much it though. If you haven't tried Microsoft Movie Maker 2, I highly recommend it.