Windows Movie Maker 2012

Windows Movie Maker 2012 is a free and fully featured program for creating your own videos from existing footage or animations. The program has become a favorite of content makers on video sharing sites like YouTube. One reason is that Windows Movie Maker 2012 is much simpler to use than most other programs of this type without sacrificing some powerful features. It is possible to make highly professional videos with the application if you learn how to use all the features and have a good sense of film production.

The heart of Windows Movie Maker 2012 is the timeline or onion embedded in the main editing screen. The timeline is a visual representation of all the clips in a video arranged in chronological order. You can drag and drop clips into the timeline to add a new piece of video. You have the option to delete sections of the timeline as well. Many different editing features can be used on the timeline such as speeding up or slowing down the video, zooming into a scene and rotating the image. All of these functions are simple to access and use from within the program. They require no special knowledge of filmmaking.

A new feature that was added to Windows Movie Maker 2012 is image stabilization. This is a powerful tool that can improve the appearance of nearly any moving video clip. Image stabilization will track certain objects in a piece of video. It will then adjust the individual frames of the video clip so that the tracked objects are aligned. The result is that you will see less shaking and jitter while the video plays. That allows viewers to have a better experience watching the video. Image stabilization can also be used to draw attention to objects that are moving through a scene by keeping them centered in the frame. Image stabilization is a tool that only professional video editors used to be able to access.

One of the more popular options in Windows Movie Maker 2012 has to do with filters. You can actually apply a number of filters to all or part of a video. The filters can dramatically change the way the video looks in certain areas. The filters can do things such as converting a scene to sepia tones, adding noise and blurring objects. Filters can give a video a professional polish if they are used correctly. The filters can also become a major distraction if they are used too much or in the wrong way. Applying filters in Windows Movie Maker 2012 is incredibly easy and intuitive.

Windows Movie Maker 2012 gives aspiring filmmakers a number of options when it comes to layering images, text and animations on top of existing footage. You can create title cards that are inserted in the beginning and end of a video. You can add text over images to help illustrate various points. You have the option of inserting images or animations into the video to play over footage. These are all options that were not fully realized in some of the older versions of Movie Maker. You even have access to the classic scene transitions in the application. Some of the transitions are better than others are although they do seem to make changing scenes in videos more interesting or entertaining.

Windows Movie Maker 2012 does have a few minor issues. One is that the program appears to over-simplify some aspects of creating a video. This can lead to problems such as not being able to cut scenes at precise points and being forced to fight against some automated features in the program to get good results. Another problem is that the program pushes too many bad filters and features at filmmakers. That can lead people to use transitions, filters and overlay text too heavily creating a video that does not appear professionally made. A final issue is that the program can slow down significantly if you are attempting to edit a long video.

Windows Movie Maker 2012 has become an iconic application for filmmakers for several reasons. One is that the free program can be used to make amazing videos that have nearly the same quality as professional productions. A less positive reason is that many people use the program to make shockingly amateurish films that use some of the most questionable features of the program to excess. Windows Movie Maker 2012 is still one of the best free video editing programs that you can download today.

Pros

• Comprehensive set of video editing features
• Intuitive and simple interface
• Quality video output in various formats

Cons

• Slows down when editing large videos
• Some features can be confusing to novices
• Automation and over-simplification can be frustrating for advanced users