5.4. Trimming Video and Audio
In addition to transitions, effects, and
titles, you can also perform a variety of other simple edits on your
projects. In this section, we'll examine these trimming functions.
First, it's possible to trim video clips, though as
usual only in very simplistic ways. This is an advantage for a number
of reasons, but consider a typical example: you have a video clip you
took with your digital camera. As is often the case with such clips,
the beginning and end of the clip are pretty rough, so what you'd like
to do is trim off the beginning and end of the clip so that it begins
and ends in more meaningful places.
In previous Movie Maker versions, you could do these
types of trims, but also edit out any portions of the video clips you
wanted. Now, you can only trim the beginning and end of a clip; you're
on your own with the middle. Here's how you make that happen.
Load the video clip you'd like to edit into the
Preview pane by selecting it in the Storyboard view. Then, navigate to
the Edit tab in the ribbon and click the Trim button in the Video
group. As shown in Figure 14,
the timeline under the preview display (and to the right of the Play
button) picks up some scrubber tools. And a new Trim tab appears while
you work.
As you do so, the part in the middle—with the thick line, as shown in Figure 15—is the part that will appear in the final project. The rest is trimmed off.
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Windows Live Movie Maker does not provide a way to
really fine-tune the trim. You can't, for example, move the scrubber
one frame at a time. What you can do while trimming, however, is
maximize the size of the Preview pane by using the resizer control and
dragging it all the way to the right. When you do this, the scrubber
bar expands as well, making it easier to make finer edits.
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NOTE
Note that Movie Maker doesn't actually edit the
underlying video file. Instead, it is simply creating pointers so that
when your final video is created, only the parts of the video you want
are included. No changes are made to the underlying digital media files
that make up the project.
Click Save and close in the Trim tab to save your changes, or click Cancel to exit without saving.
In addition to this bit of video editing, you can
also edit the audio mix that is applied to your project. This
option—exposed by the Mix button in the Soundtrack group on the Home
tab—only becomes active if you've added a sound file to use as a
soundtrack. When you click this button, the small control shown in Figure 16 appears.
By default, the audio mix is perfectly balanced
between your soundtrack and whatever audio is present in the underlying
video clips. However, if you'd prefer the soundtrack to take aural
precedence (that is, be louder), you can slide this control to the
right. Likewise, if you'd prefer for the underlying audio in the video
clips to be louder than the soundtrack, you can slide this control to
left.
NOTE
If you slide the control all of the way in
either direction, the opposite audio source will be completely muted.
To utilize only your soundtrack and mute the video clips' underlying
audio, slide the control all the way to the right.
NOTE
This Mix control works for all clips in your project. That is, you cannot create a different audio mix for each clip.
