Let’s say you wanted to create a movie from a bunch of pictures or videos from your picture library and share it with your family and friends. How about creating a video greeting card for your loved ones for a birthday, valentine’s day, mother’s day or father’s day. I created a simple video with the pictures we took over the summer and shared it with my folks back home. They thought it was creative and wanted to know how they could do it. So here is blog post for that.
What you need is:
- Pictures and/or Videos
- Music (optional)
- Windows Live Movie Maker (Sorry, I don’t own a Mac so I have to work with Microsoft Windows 7)
Let’s get started.
For this post, I am going to use the sample pictures, sample videos and sample music that come with Microsoft Windows.
Start by launching Windows Live Movie Maker:
Click “Add Videos and Photos” and add videos and/or photos.
If you like, you can add any music you have to be played as you progress through the movie.
When you add music, you’ll note that it will overlay over the entire movie.
I can also multiple music files to my movie. In this movie, I will change my music track as I transition from pictures to the video. First click where you want to make the transition.
Next go to the “Music Tools” ribbon and click “Split”
This will split music track into two and allow you to add another music track. Highlight the music that you want to change and hit delete and add a new music track.
Most likely the video you used already contains some audio in it. If you just like to keep that audio, then you don’t need to add background music to it. If you do want to add background music, then you want to ensure that the audio from the video you added to your movie is muted so that the background music can take over. For that, go to Project>Audio Mix and move the slider all the way to the right so that the music track will take over the audio.
Add Captions to the pictures if you want:
Using the Text tool add the transitions you like. Yes, great Creative!
That’s it. Now it is time to share the movie with your family.
There are a bunch of services available to you integrated with Windows Movie Maker: Skydrive, Youtube, Facebook, Windows live groups and Flickr. Choose anyone that you are comfortable with. I will go with Youtube so that I can embed the video with this blog post.
almost done:
Creativity is your friend. Creating movies or personal greetings for your friends and family is easier than you think – of course I mean amateur videos!
So, here is the final movie I created.
Important: While creating and sharing movies, take care as to NOT VIOLATE Copyrights agreements of any content.
One advantage of using Youtube as a service is that you edit the video in Youtube Video Editor. Check out the same video edited on Youtube.
