Movie Maker: worst program ever

I'm trying to save certain clips of a movie as individual pieces in Movie Maker, and in the process of this simple task I believe that I have found the most unstable program ever created. It seems that doing anything in Movie Maker carries the risk of losing all your work. In 20 minutes it crashed 5 times on me.

Can anyone recommend a free, decent movie editor for a video-editing novice such as myself? Wrt to non-free software, is Sony's "Vegas" program any good?

 

I have had similar results with Movie Maker it's a worthless program. I currently use Adobe Premier Pro 2.0 but it's costly. I would definietly recommend it though if you find yourself searching for a top notch video/movie editing program.

 

I know all about the crashing in Movie Maker. I got sick of it and researched something else. I got Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 7 (there's also plain movie studio, and the more expensive Vegas 7). It cost about $130ish at Best Buy. I haven't had a crash with it yet. If you don't need a lot of features get plain movie studio(~$90), Platinum has a few extra features, and Vegas 7 has many more (but it's not in my budget at $500-something). Also, they all come with DVD Architect, a DVD authoring app.

Edit: here's a comparison page on the 3.
http://www.sonymediasoftware.com/products/product.asp?PID=404&PageID=28

 

Its ok for making quick videos, but it does crash ALOT.

There are really no free decent video editing programs out there right now.

 

I havent had any trouble with WMM crashing, but its just poorly featured. Nearly impossible to mix audio streams.

I'm now using Adobe Premiere Elements.

 

I use Boilsoft Joiner and Splitter. www.boilsoft.com

I like it because it's powerful, you can cut down to the last milisecond if you want, but very easy and simple to use. Straight forward GUI.

Not free but comes with 15 day trial. Try it!
I bought it because it's worth the money and they keep releasing new version free for registered user.

 

I'll take a look at your recommendations, guys. My friend was working with Vegas on his desktop once and it seemed like a good program, certainly better than MS's attempt at video editing. Even so I do not need a high-end editor, so it looks like the standard version of Vegas is suitable. Thanks a lot!

 

To the guy trying to mix audio streams use an external program called audicity (freeware) and import it back in.


For video editing use Ulead Videostudio 10, Expensive, like $110-130 but its just plain ez and awesome and can even use green screens to edit urself into any backdrop or movie, wicked cool, way fun. I bought mine for like $50 cuz i upgraded from Videostudio 7 which came with my External DVD drive, I recommend buying a dvd burning drive if u dont already have one, cuz alot come with some sort of editing software.

 

Yeah, I'd just prefer to have the one program do the lot, but thanks for your suggestion. Another thing WMM is missing (that I know of) playing a clip backwards. Makes it hell trying to sync voices.

 

Audicity in my opinion can never be completly replaced as it is too advanced to be in a movie editing program. It is a professional level app for free, and its features are far advanced above most video editing programs' audio editors. But to each his own, to the person starting this thread srry for getting off subject, i guess how much u shoud be willing to spend should be based on wat u intend to do with it.....wat is it used for, Poster give us ur intentions.

 

I'm not doing anything fancy, just chopping up a 1:45hr movie into pieces and inserting them into a PowerPoint presentation. If WMM didn't crash so often, it would probably suffice for my needs.

 

You can use Blender, but it is probably overkill...

http://www.blender.org/features-gallery/features/

I take it back, Blender if it does what you want it to do, would be the least bloated one possible.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_video_editing_software

 

Actually, for a free program that you don't pay over a hundred bucks for, WMM is actually pretty good. Yes, there is some stability issue (I think it's due to its autosave features, which always cause it to crash for some reason), but overall it's pretty good. The audio mixing part is pretty poor, but if you what you are doing, then you could still do some pretty cool stuff with it. I have been making movies with WMM for years (two 20min video each year for the last 4 years due to my school). To say the least, some of these video were actually pretty good. Compared with the videos from my friend (who used the Sony Vegas Software), mine was equally as good with the same amount of good effects and sound.

So yeah, for a free program, it does pretty decent and powerful program. You just got to save alot and deal with a user unfriendly audio mixing interface, but at least you don't have to pay a hundred dollars for it .

 

Blender is 3D animation software, not a video editor...

 

That's true, I made several short films with WMM and endured the crashing. I just got tired of it and wanted something with more advanced features for my short films (Vegas MS Platinum), but it's great for basic stuff so you don't have to pay a bunch of money. It has a bunch of free plugins available out there for transitions and video effects (and even bluescreen, but no greenscreen to my knowledge).

If your friend has Vegas and it was somewhere equal to the effects and such of your WMM video, he needs to learn how to use the advanced features of Vegas, it really pays off.

 

I used WMM and Sony Vegas on my latest video I made. (Which helped win my team, team 568, the Judge's Award at the FIRST Robotics Silicon Valley Regional, w00t!!) I prefer to use WMM whenever I can because it's very, very easy to use. I had to use Vegas just to add a watermark to my work. Now, you can do watermarks in WMM with a little xml 'hack', but it's easier to get it exactly how you want in Vegas.

My major gripe with Vegas was that it takes ~35% longer to render a video than with WMM... The difference might not be as much on a core duo rig, but I was doing this on my Athlon-XP 1800+ laptop...

 

I depends on what you are rendering the video as. If you render to .WMV in WMM, it's not going to take as long as rendering to DV-AVI on Vegas. A true comparison would be when you render the same video under the same file type and bit rate.

 

Whenever i make any home movie projects, i always prayed that it will not crash. Well, it's definitely a basic program for basic needs.

 

Yea, it's hard to do that way since vegas doesn't let you render it in wmv, I had to end up doing it in divx. So it wasn't a true comparison, but the rendering process certainly annoyed me...first time I did it, it tried to render my 126 MB movie as 7.6 GB... But I was able to get it way down by doing it in divx... Besides, the only thing I use it for was for watermarks...most good looking videos look good because of the timing of the music and video, not the effects. (As I'm sure you know.) But it does have some effects that can make a video look good that are better than WMM's effects...the speed-up video effect for example...

 

Movie Maker helped me do some basic things, it is easy and results are not so bad. The price is great. I used to use Movie Maker 2 in XP. Maybe that could be a problem for you guys? Now I use Movie Maker in Vista and it didn't crash even once. It says Movie maker version 6! Now I am not a much of a big user of this program, so I can't say it WILL NOT crash, but so far so good.

I also have VirtualDub (free) just in case for some additional things (like repairing movies) and I use AVIVO converter for quick recoding. It is probably the fastest recoder available for free anyway.

So be sure you are using MovieMaker 2 for XP.

Cheers,

Ivan

 

I unfortunately can't run WMM 6 in Vista because Ati doesn't have DX10 drivers for the IGP320M... And if you don't have the DX10 drivers, you can't run WMM, aero, flip3d, or windows dvd maker...
I've tried copying the files from WMM 6 in Vista to XP, but it doesn't run in XP

 

I've been using Vegas Movie Studio Platinum for about a year, and it's hands down the best consumer video editing software out there. It's extremely stable, I've had only a handful of crashes (much better than my experiences with Pinnacle or Ulead), and the real-time effect generation makes it a very smooth program. My PC's not exactly top of the line either (P4 2.6, 1 GB, 9800 Pro), but it still runs wonderfully.

 

I stumbled upon Jahshaka today through one of my RSS feeds. It's only in alpha, but it looks promising.

 

if u have XP-SP2 than u should be able to use Windows Movie Maker 2.1 (it is INCLUDED in SP2 & it is not far off from vista WMM6) - never had any issue with it!

cheers ...