5.2. Adding Video Effects
In addition to transitions, you can also apply a
limited selection of special effects to your videos. This time around,
there are six effects, all of which are color tone changes like Black
and white or Sepia tone. By contrast, previous versions of Movie Maker
included a wide range of effects, such as blurring, brightness changes,
various color fades, hue changes, and zooms. Video effects work much
like transitions. They're available from the Effects group of the
Visual Effects tab in the ribbon, and you can apply one effect per
clip. Note, however, that transitions and video effects are configured
separately, so you can have one transition and one effect per clip,
which certainly spices things up just a little bit. In Figure 12,
you can see a photo that has been given a Roll transition and a Sepia
tone color cast, animating into the preview display. Look out, George
Lucas.
5.3. Using Titles
If the paltry selection of transitions and video
effects hasn't gotten you down yet, wait until you see Windows Live
Movie Maker's titling capabilities. Once again, whereas before we had a
wide range of options, now we have a much more limited set of
functionality that is entirely in keeping with the application's
transition to Web-based videos. So instead of separate titles and
credits, we can now add one single-line text box per clip.
For example, say you're editing a movie of your
vacation to Hawaii. You might add a title at the beginning of the
video, and then perhaps at various points throughout to describe where
each scene occurred. And you might want to wrap up the video with a
short farewell message. As with transitions and effects, you want to
balance your use of titles so that they don't overpower the movie, but
provide useful context. The simple titling capabilities in Windows Live
Movie Maker help ensure that you're not making an animated version of a
ransom note.
To add a title to a clip, navigate to the Edit pane
in the Windows Live Movie Maker ribbon. There, you'll see two groups,
Text and Font, that apply to titles. The first, Text, includes a single
command, Text box, for adding a title to the currently selected clip.
The second, Font, includes the standard set of font tools so you can
control how the title looks. These groups are shown in Figure 13.
The standard rules apply here: you can add only one
title—excuse us, text box—per clip. You can't use Shift+Enter to create
multiple-line titles, but if you do type more than one line can
accommodate, the text will overflow and the box will grow to include
it. Also, titles are attached to the body of the clip, so if you apply
a transition that animates the introduction of the clip (like Roll),
then the title will animate in with the clip. This speaks to another
difference between earlier version of Movie Maker and this version: you
can't separately animate a title as you could before. They're just
static text boxes.
