Windows Movie Maker makes editing home movies a breeze

Q: When I do a short movie (from a baseball game) on the 3 1/2 disk, can I download and edit it in Movie Maker 2? When I say edit I mean take and move out just the parts I want. I am sure I can but it helps to have someone else tell me it can be done.

A: Without knowing what type of camera you have I am going to assume it has the capability to download the video to your computer either through a USB cable, a firewire cable or by piping the video straight in to your video card on your computer.

If not, you’ll want to contact a local company that specializes in transferring video to digital format.

Once you have the movie as a digital file on your computer you can fire up Windows Movie Maker and use the Import video link to add the video to your movie project. When doing this you might want to uncheck the box that says Create clips for video files. If you leave this box checked Windows Movie Maker will attempt to guess at where scenes begin and end in your movie and from my experience, Windows Movie Maker does a lousy job with this task.

Once you have imported the video, the easiest way to edit the video is to just add the entire video clip to your project and start playing the video in Windows Movie Maker. When you get to a spot in the movie that you want to remove, just pause the video and use the button to the right of the play controls that has a tooltip that reads split the clip into two clips at the current frame.

When you click this button, Windows Movie Maker will split your movie into two clips. The first will be the video leading up to the point when you clicked the split button and the second will be the remaining video after you clicked the split button.

You can continue to do this to create clips for both parts of the movie you want to keep and parts of the movie you want to delete. When you are done just right click on each clip you want to delete and click the Delete option or just click on the clip and hit the Delete button on your keyboard.

Before you know it you will have your movie masterpiece.

This post was originally broadcast Friday, May 11, 2007 on Tech Talk with Noobie, a weekly radio show on WCBK 102.3 FM in Martinsville, Indiana. Tech Talk with Noobie airs every Friday between 11:30 a.m. and noon. If you have a question you would like Noobie to answer on the air, simply e-mail your question to .