Hey guys! Since so many people are using this program for their project, I thought I would post a few troubleshooting things I ran into. I don't know if any of you have been or will be having these same issues, but I thought I'd save you some time by telling you what I found about them.
I wanted to load a music file from a CD I burned on Mediaplayer on my home computer. This same file is in my itunes. For some reason, the file was formated in .dca which is not supported by moviemaker. The file has to be converted to one of the supported files. My ex found a program online to convert the file and he converted it to an mp3 for me. When you go to "import audio" you may need to select from the "all files" section to find an mp3 file.
When you put your image files in your storyboard, you can edit the timeline by clicking and dragging. My problem was that I couldn't shrink the timeline as short as I needed it to be. If you are having this problem, you may need to maximize the storyboard to shrink the time for the frame to a shorter period. The maximize icon is the third from the left on the storyboard pane. You can also increase or decrease the time for the frame by going into video effects and scrolling down until you see the icon "speed up double" or "slow down half." Drag the icon onto your frame. You can do this multiple times to keep reducing or increasing the timeline for the frame. If you want to remove an effect (either a video effect or a transition effect), you can click on your frame and then on "video effects" in the menu. You can add or remove effects from this window. You can also remove a transition effect by clicking on the effect and selecting "delete."
Also - this may be common knowledge, but it was new to me and it made life MUCH simpler when I figured it out. If you drag all your images into a powerpoint file and edit them, you can go to "save as" and choose "other formats." Then at the bottom box under the file's name you can scroll down and select "JPEG something or another" and save every slide as a JPEG. Then, when you go to import pictures, you have all of your slides in picture format and you can select which slides to use from here. This was particularly useful because I could put my slides in the order I wanted them to appear in the storyboard in powerpoint, then save the slides as a JPEG, and then have them in order to drag into my video. If you make changes to the file, be sure to go back and save every file again as JPEG to do updates. I keep saving mine to my desktop for easy access, but I have to be sure to select "desktop" every time because it defaults to my documents and I keep opening it three or four times wondering "what the heck is wrong with this? Why didn't it save my stuff?" before I realize what I did wrong.
Now, I have a question for all of you if anyone knows. My video is coming along great except for one issue. I am doing a rapid succession of images and they are stuttering sometimes. I think this may just be because of the memory on my computer or because I have so many other programs open at the same time, but I'm not sure. Sometimes it works just right and sometimes it doesn't. Does anyone know if this problem will go away once the video is published?
I'm really getting the hang of this, so if you have any questions I might can help (or at least empathize if I can't!) I'm going to be hanging out in my office some this weekend so you can email me at my work email (you should all have it in the last email AKB sent) or I can give you my phone number if you want it. You know I'm all worried about displaying that kind of personal info online so feel free to email me today before 4:30 and I will send it to you via email (or send me your number and I'll send it to you via text!)
I'm loving this project thing. It's the coolest thing I've ever done and I'm feeling a real sense of accomplishment from it. I hope you guys are enjoying it, too!!
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Terrific advice here, and I'm glad you're digging this project! The stuttering -- yes, that's most likely just an issue of processing power. It should get better once you publish the completed project as a video, but it may still stutter on others' computers. Your vid file will be large (bc of all the images), so can take a long time to load. But - don't worry about this - nothing you can do, really, just a function of the technology!
ReplyDeleteRemember, all, after you're done editing your projects, you need to "publish" them through moviemaker to change the file from a .mswmm (or whatever it's called) to a movie file (.mp4, .avi, etc). When you choose the "publish" option, you'll have more options -- do you want to publish for a DVD? For a website? And so on and so forth. The options correspond to the size and quality of the file. The bigger the file, the better the quality; when the file is small, info is rendered and "shrunk" to fit, and thus you can lose some clarity on images and things like this.
However, you probably want to choose the smallest file because you need to upload your videos somewhere so we can see them. You should probably upload them to YouTube. I know some of you are uncomfortable with making your info so public -- this isn't a problem! You should have an option when uploading not to make the file searchable, or completely public, or something like this. As long as you can access the file in class, this is a good option. If you want, you can then embed the video in the class blog (but that is not mandatory!).