Scott Hanselman

Turning 105 gigs of Digital Video into a one hour Wedding DVD with Windows Live Movie Maker

March 26, 2012 Comment on this post [16] Posted in Musings
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Here's the tale of how I took 7 hours of PAL DV tape and digital video, two CD's worth of music, 322 photos that totaled 105 gigs of digital assets and turned it into a DVD of my brother in law's wedding. The result was 66 min, 364 cuts and included music, overlays (who's that cousin?) and some nice transitions, as well as a DVD menu.

I know next to nothing about digital video and I'm sure all of you who will comment on this will say stuff like "Dude, why didn't you use Adobe Premiere/Avid/iMovie/an IPad" or whatever. You'll also say that you have created much more interesting/complex/impressive projects. Poop on you, I say. I'm feeling pretty darned proud of myself here because I just made a DVD that my family will love. ;)

OK, here's what my amateur self did.

My wife went to South Africa for a month last year to her brother's wedding. I stayed home with the kids. She returned with five hours of digital video on a bunch of PAL Digital Video Cassettes. PAL is essentially the non-US format. We use NTSC here.  PAL is 576 lines interlaced. She also brought over 300 photos across a half dozen digital cameras as well as an other two hours of 720p video shot with our little Canon S95.

Importing/Ripping Video from Tapes

First, I needed to get the PAL video off the mini-DV tapes. If you want to rip PAL DV tapes you really need a PAL DV player, then you can just hook up a Firewire (IEEE 1394) cable and import the video directly.

I decide to use Windows Movie Maker because it was free. I have a Mac around here somewhere but it's a few years old and I really wanted to edit this as fast as possible so I used my more powerful machine which is my Windows Desktop.

Back in the Windows XP days I remember this experience sucking badly. There were Firewire drivers to find, and most machines were too slow and too small to import video without dropping frames. In this case I just plugged in the cable to the camera, then to the PC and got a dialog.

Importing Digtal Video

I selected import and it even chopped up the scenes into separate files. About 60 gigs and 5 hours later I had all my PAL mini DVD tapes in an uncompressed AVI format.

That's 55 gigs of Video Files

Getting Assets Organized

Cool. I also had some CDs and music we bought I knew I wanted to use, as well as all the other AVIs from digital cameras, some DVDs of other video and all those photos. I put them each into folders like this:

Raw DVDs, Source Audio, Source Photos, Source Tapes, Source Videos

This is as far as I went for "asset management," although we did go through the video and give them descriptive filenames like this (yes, that's an actual filename):

"17A - Ceremony Begins; MC, Pastor Arthur prayer & welcome; Choir sings; Mbusi, Fatty & other girl arrive; Mbux & Groomsmen Bridesmaids Phili waiting in car Vusi4 2011-09-27 08.23.20.avi"

That file name might seem silly, but the  gamble paid off later. It's totally unambiguous. At this point we're organized and have 105 gigs of files on an external drive.

105 Gigs of Digital Assets

Editing in Windows Live Movie Maker

As I recall around the Windows XP times Windows Movie Maker wasn't very good, but I thought I'd give it a try, because it's free, sure, but also because I didn't want to do lot of multi-layered super complex editing, I just wanted to make a wedding DVD. I did want to do some reasonable interesting editing though because I had multiple camera angles on the same event. I also had the source music that was playing the background.

This meant I would/should be able to, for example, take three angles on the ring along with the music in the background and assemble a series of quick cuts in order on the same event while cleaning up the music using the original source. That was about the trickiest thing I'd want to do.

Here's an example sequence. The bride is coming in, I've got cross fades between some (indicated by the white triangle in the corner of each segment) and tight cuts between others. There's music coming in as she walks up, that fades out, the ring, then another song starts up and some photos come in.

You can mix photos and videos and get a "Ken Burns effect" automatically with pans and zooms around the stills. I mixed and matched video and photos along with audio and didn't have any trouble. I ended up with 364 scenes/cuts in the end, about 80% video and 20% photos.

The Bride coming in and the Ring

Each box there is a segment of video. You can split, trim, set starts and ends and move them around. The green lines are audio files that I brought in of the music that was playing at the time. That made the audio a lot nicer when it was just music playing and allowed for fun dance sequences like this excerpt video below. I really like the crazy color effect starting at 10 seconds in. It really works with the bridesmaids dresses.

I even published that segment above directly from within Windows Live Movie Maker with the built-in YouTube Plugin.

YouTube Plugin in Windows Live Movie Maker

I can zoom in to make the segments lengths expand which makes their size more representative of their length in seconds I can also hover over a segment and see how long it is, the filename it came from (see now why I used big filenames?) as well as it's speed, effects, etc all in a tooltip. This segment is about 8 seconds long.

Lots of information in the Windows Live Movie Maker Tooltips

The whole video ended up being 66 minutes and 35 seconds long. It rendered into a 10Mb/s5 gig HD WMV file and fit nicely on a 480p DVD.  I may do a 25Mb/s or 50Mb/s Blu-Ray also. Remember that the PAL tapes were 576i and the HD video from the digital cameras were 720p so there isn't really a reason to do a Blu-Ray, but the still photos are all >5 Megabits so they'd be improved by a 1080p treatment. I was pleasantly surprised to see 1080p as an option in Windows Live Movie Maker:

1080p is an option in Windows Live Movie Maker

Size of Videos

I was a little concerned that maybe Windows Live Movie Maker (WLM) couldn't do large videos or long videos or complex videos. With 105 gigs over 5 hours turning into an hour of video I figured I'd be taking a chance. Turned out it worked fine. I kept all the videos in their folders and the WLM file is just pointers to all the things I wanted done. The final video editing file from WLM was about 500k. It looks like an XML file with a bunch of time codes.

NOTE: I did have one technical issue where I was getting all black video previews in Windows Live Movie Maker. It turned out to be an NVidia Display Driver issue. Mine was old, and when I upgraded to the latest drivers I was all set.

It took two sessions of four hours each to edit the video and about an hour to render. I rendered into a large WMV file that was about 5 gigs. I did have three 'hang' crashes in Windows Live Movie Maker over the 8 hours, although I'd been saving every few minutes the whole time. The hangs seemed to be related to me moving audio around too fast then right clicking immediately, but I need to check on that.

Then I ran Windows DVD Maker and dragged the final file in. It automatically created scenes and a DVD menu. The opening title also includes a music background and the menu moves (it's not static) which is nice.

Windows DVD Maker includes a lot of options

One of my other obscure requirements was that I needed to be able to make both NTSC and PAL versions of the DVD. I didn't see any options for this in Windows Live Movie Maker, but there are options in Windows DVD Maker. I was able to burn two master DVDs, one PAL and one NTSC. I'll then make copies and send 20 of these home to South Africa knowing they will play in their DVD player.

PAL and NTSC in Windows DVD Maker

Conclusion

The couple of crashes were irritating but I crash Adobe Premiere a lot too. Overall, I was impressed. Windows Live Movie Maker was easy to use, had hot-keys for things like Split that sped me up once I got a rhythm going and handled a VERY large amount of high quality video without any issues. I'll use it again for family stuff, weddings and the like.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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March 26, 2012 4:30
I shot and edited my sisters wedding video from DV about 12 years ago. In order for it to render without dropping frames I had to strip down XP and kill all unneccessary processes. I must have repeated it half a dozen times before it worked well enough to burn to DVD. Everyone was pleased with the results and it was a quite a technical achievement too!
March 26, 2012 5:06
I use Movie Maker all the time and find it very flexible and easy to use; it has come a long way since it was introduced on the XP era.

I do experience some issues when trying to upload videos to Facebook, but I reckon they have to do more with FB infrastructure than with Movie Maker. In any case, after creating the WMV file, I use HandBrake to convert it to M4V (followed by a manual upload, of course).
March 26, 2012 7:01
I use WL Movie Maker all the time. I've actually had to go the other way, from NTSC to PAL it worked like a carmed. Turn "hello from USA" videos and a bunch of pictures into an awesome video that the family overseas loved. I've looked at the Adobe family of products and the learning is such that it leaves you hyperventilating into a brown bag. WLMM is simple and gets the job done. One think I wish it did was chroma key but her, beggars can't be choosers...
March 26, 2012 9:36
I used Photodex ProShow Producer for my daughter's birthday party, it was easy, super friendly and very stable.

I came from Adobe Premiere and Windows Live Movie Maker, after using ProShow, I'm not switching back anymore.
March 26, 2012 10:27
You're in the lead for the title; best brother-in-law 2012.

That's some feat! I congratulate you and the happy couple.
March 26, 2012 12:22
What happened to me as amateur nerd in Adobe Premiere is that I got lost in all the possibilities - a realization after a week of work and having done about 5 minutes of video.

Switching back to WLMM allowed me to actually finish my holiday video :) I had an additional work step in splitting the audio track from the final cut with VirtualDub, put it into a Cubase project and doing a whole lot of music overlays mixed with the real sounds. Then joined audio and video together again and presto. But I think these days you can do it pretty well with WLMM?
March 26, 2012 15:40
I'd be interested to know how you dealt with the MOV files from the canon, im currently faced with a significant amount of footage shot on a canon sx230 hs that I want to make accessible through media player so I can stream when wanted.
March 26, 2012 17:42
Best thing I ever started doing: Come home from vacation, and immediately run to the "man-cave" where I drop all HD recordings and photos into Lightroom, sit tirelessly with a video editing program, and by the end of the first day back from vacation (around 9 hours of work), I have a video of our adventure. If you just sit and get it done, it is astounding how much better the videos can be as your memory is fresh.

Years later, I still jump on youtube from my TV and watch a video from "Trip to Branson, MO," or "Trip to LA."
March 26, 2012 21:40
Take a look at Animoto http://animoto.com/ or http://www.magisto.com to help automate the process next time. You upload the clips to them and they put it together with music for you.
March 27, 2012 6:10
I like the music in the wedding video. need artist and title so i can purchase. Thanks
March 27, 2012 7:31
I create a designated folder and dump Copies everything in there: video clips, photos and mp3s. Everything that gets imported into Windows Live Movie Maker comes from that folder - as well as the resulting .wlmm, .wmv and dvd-creator files.

When my video project is done, I burn a dvd of that folder, then delete the version off my pc to save space. The .wmv goes to Vimeo and the project dvd goes in a drawer.

@Dylan Fairbairn - I shoot all my video on a Lumix digital camera (in movie mode) and the clips are all .mov files. I drag them into Windows Live Movie Maker with out problems. No need to convert them first. But I do have codec's installed for .mov's and Windows Media Player to behave together - which may account for that convenience - if WLMM and WMP share some code base.

@Frank Quednau - I agree totally. WLMM is just flexible enough to make nice video's but not overwhelming so that you're lost in choices. And the price is right too :)
March 27, 2012 11:08
Kofi - That's Liquideep - Still
March 27, 2012 11:14
Kofi, no, pardon, me. THAT music is actually Bojo Mujo DJ Ma-Eli DJ Tea-kay & Mashavula "Do you Know / Crazy"

March 27, 2012 15:39
Does that mean Movie Maker has improved in later versions of Windows? I'm running XP at home and tried using it for our own wedding video (almost 5 years overdue now...). I found however it ruined much of the audio which was already low quality and it sounded like the band were playing in a goldfish bowl :(
March 28, 2012 15:39
@ Ian Wright - WLMM has improved dramatically since xp. The version requires Vista or Greater to work. Xp is still stuck with the same old version.
April 03, 2012 20:45
I've done a couple of funeral memorial videos in WLMM and have to say, it has definitely come a LONG way since the XP crapversion.

There are certainly more powerful tools out there, but WLMM is free, it's easy to grasp for us amateurs, and it works reasonably well overall.

Grats on the Best Brother in Law award and keep up the great work!

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Disclaimer: The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in any way.