I hate Windows Movie and DVD Makers.
With that out of the way, let me explain why. First, don’t think I’m slamming Vista. I use Vista’s Media Center as an entertainment center in my room. I watch TV on it, record my favorite shows off cable and even play my music as well. I also use the IR adapter and Windows remote – I really am that much of a dork. The point is, Vista works for me, and I’ve been pretty happy with the overall experience. I’ve also accepted its limitations (I bought a Macbook this past Christmas for redemption), and have even overlooked the ridiculous UAC popups (I disabled them after a few days of purchase). The 20 fps loss in gaming was upsetting, but at least Microsoft tried to fix that. They, (thanks to outrage by the worldwide gaming community), get a reprieve there.
So, what’s the problem with Vista’s integrated multimedia editing software?
This may take awhile.
Movie Maker’s storyboard doesn’t support basic keyboard strokes. I use Audacity on nearly a daily basis, and have become accustomed to the “Home” button jumping to the beginning of an audio file. ”End” should go to the end, and “Shift” + arrow keys should highlight portions of your track. Oh, and the arrow keys should move the cursor right and left, respectively. You know, common sense commands that every other Windows program invented in the past decade have seemed to utilize. Apparently Microsoft doesn’t deem these commands necessary while editing content. The weird thing is, these are almost all I use in Audacity, and they help me save time and edit music in minutes.
Go figure. I must be doing something odd.
Movie Maker wasn’t stable either when editing my project. Because I was at a conference all day Saturday, I recorded the UGA football game through Media Center so I could view it later. This morning, I dumped it into Movie Maker to delete the commercials with the intention of making a dvd to add to my personal collection. After slowly dragging the cursor through the video and splicing out commercials, Movie Maker stopped responding. The play button worked, but the videos quit displaying, which completely put a damper on the editing process. Two restarts later and everything began working again. Kind of. For the most part. Until it did it twice more.
At this point I learned to save often.
Once completed, I exported the file to DVD and had it auto-open in DVD Maker. Now, I have a fairly decent desktop: A 2 ghz C2D Allendale processor, 2 gigs of ram and an 8600 GT video card; not the best setup for gaming, but adequate for basic video editing. I’ve definitely done much more intensive work on a lesser computer, and had fewer issues in professional programs like Adobe Premiere Pro. So, when the dvd menu creation screen took a full minute to render a 10 second preview, I was ready to punch my LCD screen. But that was only after getting the video to actually load correctly. That unto itself was a whole other issue.
Setting a video to appear as the menu screen’s background was like trying to move a building with my bare hands. The browse option is there (actually besides changing the font and layout style, foreground and background videos were the only other options for you to customize), so for neither to work right was pretty amazing. How did Microsoft overlooked such a failure?
This is how it’s supposed to work:
1) Browse to the video (I sliced Moreno’s amazing touchdown dive and saved it).
2) Select said video.
3) Click save changes.
That’s it. Easy, right? Well, it supposedly loads your video, but the first time I tried it refused to play it at all. It took random clips from the movie and played those instead. Rinse and repeat and I saw my movie, but with different auto-generated clips interspersed throughout. At this point I quit the project, grabbed some tylenol and came back for another round. I chose another style, reloaded Moreno as the foreground video, (the background option was greyed out on this style), and was treated to extremely choppy video playback of only half my video. At least it was only showing my sliced video this time, so I settled for a compromise and gave up.
I exported to DVD, and have been waiting for it to complete for the last hour and a half.
Thanks Microsoft! You’ve now assured me that your integrated editing software is horrible, and I will continue using iMovie for my basic video projects.
