In what seems to be another lifetime, I was skilled at making movies. I learned movie-making skills in graduate school and had to make a film as part of a class project. We’re talking Super 8 here (circa 1976), but nonetheless, most people showed a great deal of creativity. Everything was done by hand with hand cutters, splicing tape, etc…
So, here I am 28 years later and the tools for making movies are easier. Easier? They are brain-dead simple. Since one of my stated goals of this project is to do videoblogging, I decided to monkey around with the baked-in movie making program in Windows, aptly called Windows Movie Maker.
The good news—it is simple to use. The bad news is that it only saves your project to some oddball Windows Movie Project file. That means you cannot play it back in Windows Media Player (are those guys in Redmond masochists?) or email it to anyone. You can save it to a CD, but you cannot intuitively save it for use in any common file format. I cannot even find a decoder/ripper that converts the file.
Using Yahoo!'s new beta video search, I strung together clips from Seinfeld and Sopranos with a title and some transitions. It’s not François Truffaut, but it’s a start. Creatively, I see no limits (other than copyright issues which Mike and I will address in our next report), but unless I can convert the files, I will have to find another editing suite.
