How to easily edit home video with free software from Microsoft

Back in the day I used to be a news video­tape edit­or. This was before cam­er­as were digit­al — think back to the days of VCRs, Beta and VHS. Yep, that was the media of the day to record music and video. That was called Analog.

The reas­on I bring that up is because edit­ing on tape, is sig­ni­fic­antly dif­fer­ent than digit­al edit­ing. The whole work­flow for Ana­log edit­ing is, well, ana­log. You start at the begin­ning and work to the end. If you need to change some­thing you’ve already com­pleted, on tape you have to redo everything from the change point for­ward, so things ten­ded to get planned out very very care­fully. And mis­takes tend to take a long time to fix.

Today, the work­flow is dif­fer­ent. I’ve nev­er pro­fes­sion­ally edited digit­ally, so the work­flow I use is likely not a best prac­tice, but it gets the job done for me.

And one of the tools I’m start­ing to use is Microsoft’s Win­dows Live Movie Maker. You’ve likely seen the I’m a PC com­mer­cials with the kids mak­ing videos — well I’m about the same speed as those kids, so yeah, the tool is easy to use 😉

Edit­ing is pretty intu­it­ive. Drag clips into a pal­let. Trim them to include only the bits you want. Place them in the prop­er order. Insert some trans­itions, maybe some titles off the top and cred­its at the end, and you’re done.

It took me maybe 2 hours to load, edit and pub­lish my video to You­Tube. The second one, below, took maybe 30 minutes — the hard­est part was select­ing the edit points and transitions.

Cue the cute puppy video.

Of course, what took the most time was transcod­ing and pub­lish­ing the video to You­Tube. Then the ver­sion pro­cessing on You­Tube takes time too, but it’s auto­mated so you’re doing some­thing else while your movie is get­ting pol­ished 🙂 But back to the software.

Microsoft Live Movie Maker comes full of all sorts of bells and whistles, some are pretty advanced too.

I’ve just star­ted down this road of video pro­duc­tion (as you can tell by the home movie qual­ity of that video), so yes, I’ll be try­ing oth­er video edit­ing soft­ware in the com­ing months.

But for now, for me on my simple home PC, Live Movie Maker is what gets the job done.

And here’s the bonus, it’s free from Mcrosoft.