Creating DVD Movies with Windows DVD Maker (part 1) - Adding Photos and Videos to Your DVD Project

NOTE

DVD Maker is available to users of Windows 7 Home Premium, Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate. If you have a lower-end Windows 7 version—Windows 7 Starter or Home Basic—you will need to upgrade to one of these versions in order to use Windows DVD Maker. Or, you could purchase one of the many third-party DVD maker applications on the market. Note that any third-party package will be more sophisticated, but also more complex, than Windows DVD Maker.

NOTE

There are actually several ways to start DVD Maker:

• From within Windows Live Photo Gallery, select a group of photos or videos. Select Make and then Burn a DVD from the toolbar.

• If you saved a DVD Maker project previously, you can double-click that project's icon in the shell and pick up where you left off.

• Simply find Windows DVD Maker in the Windows 7 Start menu and launch the application manually, and then add content to an empty project as you go.

Because the latter approach will gain you the skills necessary to explore the other options, we'll examine Windows DVD Maker as a standalone application here.

What you can't do anymore is access Windows DVD Maker from within Windows Live Movie Maker. The application is now designed solely to publish videos to the Web. If you are using Windows Live Movie Maker to edit videos, you will need to save them to your hard drive and then manually import them into Windows DVD Maker.

NOTE

Like Windows Live Movie Maker, Windows DVD Maker works with something called a project, a file you can save and reload later that describes the DVD you're making. Unlike with Windows Live Movie Maker, there is no obvious way to save a project while you're compiling your DVD. However, if you look closely, you'll see a single menu item, File, in most of the Windows DVD Maker screens. When you click this menu, you'll see options for saving, loading, and making new projects. You can also save your project by clicking the more prominent Cancel button. This will close Windows DVD Maker, but the application will prompt you to save the current project first. (Hey, remember that you use a Start button to shut down the system. In Microsoft's world, this is all perfectly logical.)

NOTE

DVD Maker projects are saved in your Videos folder by default.

NOTE

Only one instance of DVD Maker can be running at a time.

NOTE

While the Windows DVD Maker application looks and works like a typical Windows wizard, the application window can actually be maximized and resized as needed. So you can use the Maximize window button to maximize the application, as you would most other applications. You can also drag at the edge of any of the application's sides to resize the window manually in each of the four directions. Put simply: you don't have to put up with the curiously tiny default size of Windows DVD Maker: you can make it whatever size you'd like.

NOTE

Windows DVD Maker, while certainly adequate for the job at hand, is a mess from a user interface perspective. There's no true menu structure, per se, just a single File menu jammed into the upper-left corner of the application window. You can add items to the current project in two different ways, one obvious and one hidden. The application's options are configured via an HTML-like Options link that sits in the lower-right corner of the window—that is, except for the DVD burner to use, which for some reason is always available in the upper-right corner of the first phase of the wizard. (Meanwhile, DVD burning speed is configured in the Options dialog.)

And while it features a prominent Internet Explorer-like "Back" button in the upper-left corner, Next is a more typical Windows-type button that sits, you guessed it, in the lower-right corner. This application deserves a special place in the User Interface Hall of Shame. It looks and works nothing like any other Windows 7 application. When you add videos to a Windows DVD Maker project, they appear in the wizard as you might expect. Pictures are a little different. If you drag one or more image files into Windows DVD Maker, the application will create a folder called Slide show, as shown in Figure 3. From this point on, any photos you add to the project are added to this one folder; and they are displayed as an animated slide show in the finished DVD.

Figure 3. The Slide show folder will contain any pictures you add to your DVD project.

NOTE

You can't have two or more photo slide shows on a single DVD. Only one is allowed.

NOTE

You also can't add videos to the Slide show folder. If you try to add a video, it will be added to the root of the project instead.

NOTE

You can navigate inside of the Slide show folder in Windows DVD Maker if you'd like. Just double-click it. To navigate back out to the root of the DVD, click the small Back to videos toolbar icon, shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4. Yet another nearly hidden user interface feature lets you escape from the Slide show folder.