5.5. Getting a Bit More Sophisticated
While simple home movies and photo slide shows are
fun, you may occasionally want to make something a bit more
sophisticated. For example, maybe you have a recorded TV show you'd
like to edit. You will want to remove the dead space at the beginning
and end of the show, at the very least. This was documented in the
previous section and is an easy fix. But what if you also want to take
the time to edit out any commercials, or edit out other bits of video
that exist in the middle of a clip? You actually can do this with
Windows Live Movie Maker, though the process is far more complicated in
this version of the application and is not documented. It's time to see
how it works.
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If you don't have a recorded TV show, perhaps
because your PC isn't connected to a TV signal through a TV tuner card,
fear not. You can use one of the sample recorded TV shows that comes
with Media Center, or a sample video file that ships with Windows
Vista. Or, grab some of your own home video footage. It's up to you.
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NOTE
Recorded TV shows are stored in
C:\Users\Public\Recorded TV by default. There's no Recorded TV folder
under a normal user account's Home folder. That's because recorded TV
shows are shared by all of the users on the PC.
You may recall that each video clip you import into
Windows Live Movie Maker is just a shortcut to an underlying file. As
you make changes to that clip in your Movie Maker project—by adding
things like transitions, effects, titles, and trims—the underlying file
is not changed in any way. This is all fairly straightforward. But what
you may not realize is that you can import the same video file into
your project multiple times. This enables you to trim it down multiple
times, into discrete and different video clips, each of which can
contain a unique part of the video.
Consider Figure 17,
a conceptual diagram representing a 30-minute TV show. In this
fictional TV show, there is some introductory material (commercials,
content from the previous show), some actual TV show content, a single
commercial in the middle (hey, it's conceptual not realistic), more TV
show content, and then some junk at the end (commercials, and perhaps
the start of the next show).
What you want from this video is the two bits of
actual content, but none of the commercials and other non-TV show
content. We know that Windows Live Movie Maker offers a way to trim the
beginning and end of a single video clip, so that part of it is easy
enough. What it doesn't offer is a way to trim out part of the middle
of a clip. This seems insurmountable until you realize that you can
simply import the same video file twice. (In this example, anyway. If
you were really going to use this tool to edit out all of the
commercials from a typical TV show, you'd have to import the same file
several times.)
Here's how it works:
Start a new Movie Maker project by choosing New from the Application menu.
Using
drag and drop or the Add button, import the recorded TV show or other
video file you'd like to edit. This imported file will be used to
create the first clip, sequentially.
Using
the Trim functionality described in the previous section, trim off the
beginning portions of the video that you'd like to leave out. Then,
trim the end portion of the video clip so that the edited video ends
right before the first commercial.
Click Save and close to save the changes.
Now, import the same file a second time and ensure that this second version appears to the right of the first, as shown in Figure 18.
With
the second clip selected, go into Edit and then Trim again. This time,
the open trim should start at the conclusion of the first set of
commercials; and the end trim should be made at the conclusion of the
TV show content. (If you're editing a real TV show, you will need to
repeat this process for as many commercial breaks as there really are.)
When you're done, you can play back your completed
project, ensuring that no commercials escaped your attention and that
the edits were as clean as possible. Remember that you can always go
back and re-edit any trims, and you can add transitions to smooth out
jarring clip changes.
When you're done—voilà!—you've got a nicely edited TV show, sans commercials. Or perhaps a home video, without the boring parts.
