A Simple Movie Editor? It's Already on Your PC!

Yesterday I found myself faced with a perplexing dilemma. I have some old home videos on DVD, and I wanted to edit them down to send a shorter DVD to a friend. (Did he need the videos of my mother doing Jane Fonda's aerobicizing program in the early 1980s? No.)

I spent the better part of an hour searching for a freeware video application that would let me do this relatively simple tweak. I mean, I'm not going to shell out for Adobe Premiere just so I can cut a few minutes out of a video.

It wasn't until after I'd installed an unbearably complicated and sluggish freeware video editor that I realized the answer was already installed on my PC, but I had never used it. The solution: Windows Movie Maker, which is part of Windows XP.

Now I've raved about Apple iMovie in the past, and iMovie runs rings around Movie Maker, but for my purposes, Movie Maker did what I needed it to do. First I ripped my DVD to an AVI file using AutoGK, then imported the file into Movie Maker. Movie Maker automatically creates scene breaks where appropriate, and it took only a few minutes to drag the clips I wanted into my new project, about half the length of the original DVD. The ability to burn the resulting film onto DVD is built right in to the program.

Now Movie Maker is hardly a fantastic tool. It's extremely limited in what it can do, but the absolute basics are covered like adding a narration track or scene transitions. If your project is simple (like mine was), it's a good solution.

You can find Movie Maker under Start > All Programs. Give it a whirl!