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How To Watermark Your Videos In Windows Movie Maker

Jessica Cam Wong — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 19:31:36 +0000

If you’ve always been fascinated by how well some YouTube videos or commercials turn out that you wish to make some of your own, why not try Windows Movie Maker to warm up your video-making skills? Lots of YouTube gurus seem be doing so. Authoring your own videos can be fun and time-consuming at the same time, so if you want to protect your work, make it more distinguishable and even professional, you should consider adding your signature.

I certainly wish I did back when I fansubbed a music piece with some (as I was told later) metaphorically incorrect translations and later laughed when I saw the exact same, incorrect lyrics I had spent hours researching for in another similar video. As you can tell, there’s no real harm in spending a few more minutes protecting your work. It may even get you more motivated when you see your own logo in your videos that you’ll continue making videos!

So before we start with the tutorial, note that the first part of the tutorial focuses on adding simple text-based watermarks, and for the second part, we’ll add an image watermark or logo into our video using the code from some brilliant users at the Movie Maker Forums.

Adding A Text Watermark

If you want a simple text watermark, not a logo, of your username or name in the lower portion of your video, you can get started right away with one of the built-in Titles.

First, start up Windows Movie Maker. Press Ctrl + I (or click on Videos under Import in the left sidebar) to import your video from your computer.

Drag your video to the timeline. Click on Title and credits under Edit in the left sidebar and then, click on Title on the selected clip.

Type your username or the text you want to appear as your video watermark.

Click on Change the title animation and choose Subtitle that appears under the first Titles, One Line section at the top of the selection box.

If you wish to position your watermark near the bottom right or left, click on Change the text font and color and choose the icon to align text right or left. You can change how transparent or opaque your watermark, as well as your font style (e.g. make the text bold or italicized), size and color.

Once you like what you see in the Preview (please note that the video player may take a few seconds to display any changes), click on Add Title.

Using the resizer (which appears when your cursor hovers on the edge of the title in the timeline), drag it across the length of your video.

You can preview your final video if you’d like, otherwise, press Ctrl + P (click on File > Publish Movie) to save the video to your computer.

This is what the product looks like with the simple text watermark.

Adding An Image Watermark Or Logo

First, if you haven’t already, create your image watermark. If it has a transparent background, it would look even better, so use Photoshop, GIMP, Paint.NET or most web-based image editors to achieve a transparent background (which the built-in MS Paint can’t do). Save it in .PNG or .GIF format in >C:\Program Files\Movie Maker\Shared\AddOnTFX\.

If you don’t have the Shared or the AddOnTFX folder, just create the folders with those exact names. You may also save your image in .JPEG format but note that it can’t contain a transparent background. If you already have your logo saved in your computer, make sure it is saved in either file formats, or you can create a new copy and save it as a .PNG or .GIF file in >C:\Program Files\Movie Maker\Shared\AddOnTFX\.

Now head to this FX Archive page and select either Windows XP Logo Creator or Windows Vista Logo Creator depending on your system.

Select the location in the video where you want your logo to appear.

Then choose the Screen Size which you can quickly find out by looking at your video file’s properties under Dimensions. If your video has different dimensions, just choose the closest numbers or (follow the original forum thread to learn how to modify the code). Then type in the dimensions for your image watermark or logo file.

Now, in the Logo filename, where the default name is image.gif, type whatever the name is for your watermark or logo file, which you saved previously in .PNG or .GIF in >C:\Program Files\Movie Maker\Shared\AddOnTFX\.

In the Name of Title field, you can name it something like MyLogo. Copy the text that appears underneath.

Open Notepad, paste the text in and save as a mylogo.xml (choose All Files (*.*) in the drop-down menu for the Save as type field) in the >C:\Program Files\Movie Maker\Shared\AddOnTFX\ folder.

Open up Windows Movie Maker (or if you have it open, restart it to see the new MyLogo), import your video, drag it to the timeline and choose Titles and credits.

Choose Title on the selected clip and in the text box under Enter text for title, input a single space (this is important!), and click Change the title animation.

You should see MyLogo in the options. Select it and click Add Title.

Using the resizer (which appears when your cursor hovers on the edge of the title in the timeline), drag it across the length of your video. You can preview your final video if you’d like, otherwise, press Ctrl + P (click on File > Publish Movie) to save the video to your computer or share it with others or on YouTube!

If you look really hard, there’s actually more tricks that good ol’ Movie Maker has to render a pretty professional video, like the Zooming effects. Do you use Windows Movie Maker or do you prefer another video editor? Let us know in the comments about your preferences and why!

How To Convert A Movie Into An Animated GIF

Matt Smith — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 22:31:45 +0000

The animated .GIF is a strange form of expression. It is only twenty or thirty frames, completely devoid of sound, repeating in an endless loop. Yet there is something intoxicating about an animated .GIF, like staring into the eyes of a hypnotist.

Creating your own animated .GIF from a movie can be a lot of fun. Animated .GIF images can be used as an avatar on a website or can be distributed among your friends. And while there are many animated .GIF images already made, creating your own will give you a distinct, unique image.

The weapon of choice in this tutorial is Windows Movie Maker. We won’t be using Windows Movie Maker to turn the file into a .GIF image, but we’ll be using it to edit the movie file so it can be easily turned into an animated movie .GIF image.

Step 1: Loading The Movie

First, we need to load the movie file. In this example I am going to use an episode of Top Gear, the famous British car show. In this episode Jeremy Clarkson tests the Ford Fiesta by driving it through a shopping mall with a Corvette in hot pursuit.

First we need to drop the movie file into Windows Movie Maker so that we can begin editing. You can do this by dragging and dropping the movie file into Windows Movie Maker. Alternative, you can go to File > Import Into Collections. Once you find the file you can select it to import the file. It will appear in the Collection area.

Now that we have the file in the Collection area, we also need to place it into the timeline below so that we can edit the file. Simpy drag-and-drop the file from the Collection area to the timeline at the bottom of the Windows Movie Maker window. This will allow us to begin editing the file down.

Step 2: Editing The Movie

An animated .GIF is only a tiny fraction of a movie. The loop on an animated .GIF usually lasts from a couple seconds to ten seconds. The reason for this is that animated movie .GIF files actually can become very large very quickly. Each frame is like a separate image. Animated .GIF images above twenty or thirty frames in size can exceed one megabyte in file size. This isn’t ideal, so you’ll need to trim down the movie to the specific part you want to make an animation of.

To do this you’ll need to crop the movie file. First, you’ll probably need to zoom out on the timeline. You can do this using the magnifying glass icons just above the timeline. Now, click on left edge of the timeline and drag to just before the part of the film you want to turn into an animated .GIF.

You will know that you are cropping the image when the cursor turn into a red double-sided arrow. Now go to the right side of the timeline and do the same thing, cropping the movie file until just after the part of the film you want to animate.

Now that we have this smaller clip, we’ll want to use the magnifying tool to zoom in. Now you simply need to start cropping the movie further until you’ve found the exact part of the movie that you want to animate. Remember, if you crop too much you can just undo your crop by pressing Ctrl+Z. Your finished, cropped video shouldn’t be much more than ten seconds in length in order to keep the file size down.

Step 3: Exporting The File & Making The Animated .GIF

Now that we have the video cropped down to a manageable size we need to export it.

On the left of Windows Movie Maker you will see the Save to my computer option under the Finish Movie section. Click on that option. You will be asked to name your file on the first screen – do so and click Next. Now you need to decide what type of movie you want to create.

In order to keep file size down our animated movie .GIF can’t be a very large image. To achieve this I recommend using the Video for Pocket PC setting. This creates a video file with a size of 208 x 160 pixels, which is small enough to work as an animated .GIF.

Now that we have the video, we need to convert the file into a .GIF. This is one thing which Windows Movie Maker doesn’t do for us, but there are websites which will. Using the instruction in the Makeuseof GIF Ninja tutorial, you’ll easily be able to convert the video file into an animated .GIF.

The results? Well, here is what I ended up with.

Cool? Now you can make your own animated .GIF from any movie you want! Share your productions in the comments.

How To Copy & Edit YouTube Videos On Your Computer

Sharninder — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 20:01:32 +0000

YouTube is the biggest video sharing site on the planet. It doesn’t matter if you’re looking for a review of the latest gadget, or a simple walking tour of a historical site, chances are you’d find it on YouTube.

Most videos uploaded to YouTube are made by amateurs like you and I, usually with modest video making equipment. It’s not a surprise that you’d find a lot of the videos lacking in quality and/or content.

Now, quality is something that you can’t do much about but if it is the content that is bothering you and you have the inclination and enthusiasm to make some changes, we’ll tell you how to go about it. Maybe one particular scene in a video really bothers you and you want to take it out. Well here’s one way to go about it.

If you want to know how to copy Youtube videos and edit them, it typically involves three steps. Since you can’t edit the videos on YouTube online, the first step is to actually download a copy of the video locally to your computer.

How to Copy YouTube Videos to your computer

There are a couple of different ways that you can copy YouTube videos to your computer and we’ve talked about a few in the past, see 18 Free Ways To Download Videos. So we won’t dwell too much on this part. Searching MakeUseOf for "download youtube videos" will bring you plenty of options.

Which brings us to the second step in the process.

Converting FLV files to Windows Media Video Files (WMV)

There are dozens of software available all around the web that could potentially help you do this conversion, but why bother with all that searching when we have the coolest open source solution for the job, ffmpeg. If you’re comfortable with the command line, you can use ffmpeg directly or download and install the excellent WinFF utility, which is basically a graphical wrap-around for the app.

Launch WinFF and click on the add button to add the FLV file you just downloaded. Select “Microsoft“ from the Convert To drop down and select the WMV2 Generic option from the Device Presets drop down. Choose a location to save the converted file to and click on convert. WinFF will launch ffmpeg which will do the conversion for you without you having to use any command line kung fu.

Editing Videos using Windows Movie Maker

Windows Movie Maker is a free software bundled with Windows which can be used to edit and enhance videos and it has built-in support to read WMV files. Mark has previously written two excellent articles on editing movies using Windows Movie Maker and those should be enough to get you started.

Use WMM to remove the offending scene(s). Use the preview window to view the results of your artistry as soon as you’re ready.

When you’re done with editing the video, click the Publish Movie button and export the movie using one of the many choices given, including burning the movie to a DVD or writing a new WMV file to the disk for playing on a computer.

Do you know of any better ways how to copy and edit a YouTube video? If so, let us know.

Make Professional Looking Videos with Windows Movie Maker (Part 2)

Mark O'Neill — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 15:00:58 +0000

In part one of this series, I showed you how to transfer your camcorder footage from the camera to your desktop using Windows Movie Maker. Today, I am going to show you what you can do next – editing your footage and adding some special effects such as music and credits. Then, exporting your finished movie.

There’s a lot more you can do with Movie Maker so I am just going to focus on the ones that enable you to bang out a good quality video. I’ll let you experiment with the other stuff yourself. If you want to see some live examples of what I am about to show you, you can check out my video blog which has most of these features in them.

So last time, we ended the article with the footage having been dragged over from the top of the screen to the storyboard below.

If you press “show timeline”, you’ll see another view of the clips. This is the view you will need to look at if you want to add anything extra such as music, credits and extra footage in the right places:

At the top of the screenshot, you will see two little magnifying glasses (one with a plus and one with a minus). The plus one zooms in and gives you the timeline in a more detailed time frame. At the moment you can see the time being split up into 5 second intervals. Zooming in, you can have the timeline split up into one second intervals. Again, that’s good for inserting extra features at exactly the right moment of the movie. The minus magnifying glass zooms back out into bigger time chunks.

To edit, take one clip at a time. Click on the “show storyboard” view and then click on the clip. It will immediately show up in the media player at the top:

When you press “play” and the footage starts rolling, a small button will then activate (shown by the red arrow in the screenshot above). This button is your editing button.

When you get to the point where you want to remove a piece of footage, press the editing button. The footage will then be split in two and a new clip will be created. Keep that clip rolling till you get to the end of the part you want to remove. Click the button again and again it will be split. This results in a clip in the middle which is the piece you don’t want. Now, right-click and select “delete” to remove it from your storyboard. Repeat with other parts of the footage until you have removed all the embarrassing scenes and drunken rants from your movie masterpiece.

It’s a bit difficult to explain this. It’s one of those things that will become apparent once you start doing it. It would be an excellent idea to backup your footage before starting the editing. That way, you can start over if you make a mistake.

The next thing might be to improve the quality of the picture or the sound. You may have filmed a scene in poor lighting or the audio might be a little faint. Movie Maker provides some options for improving things like that.

Click on the clip you want to alter and then right-click. A little menu will pop up. Choose “Video Effects”.

You’ll then see options for changing the clip. Some of them are very Photoshop-like such as “chalk and charcoal” but the main ones you should focus on are the brightness options, fade in and out, and slow down & speed up.

Just make your options and save. Now, replay the clip and you should see your changes.

If you want to change the audio volume, click on the clip you want to alter and then press the audio button on the far left. Increase or decrease as desired. Remember to keep saving all your changes.

Now the credits. You can enter credits anywhere in the video but normally you would see them at the beginning and the end. So let’s do the start credits first. Go to storyboard view and click on the first clip. At the top menus, choose Tools–>Titles and credits. You will then see this.

Choose the first one and you will then get boxes to type your credits in :

The options are self-explanatory and as you do each one, the changes are immediately shown on the media player so you can see if they look the way you want them to. You have a variety of animations to choose from and you can change the font style and background colours. When it is finished, the credits will automatically be inserted into your story board. If it is in the wrong place, just click and drag the clip with your mouse to wherever you want it to go.

To do the end credits, just go to Tools–>Titles and credits again and choose the end credits option. Then repeat as before. The one limitation of the end credits is that you are not able to put too much text in it. So no long thank you’s can be inserted!

There are three other main options to import material into your movie. Music (more on that in a moment), photos and other movie material. By inserting photos, you can perhaps put some music to it and have a musical montage! If you want to insert a clip from another movie file, just import it from your computer and drag it into the appropriate position in your storyboard.

The last option I am going to tackle here is the music. You first have to edit your MP3 or WMA file in something like Audacity. You can get lots of copyright-free public domain music over at the Internet Archive and you then need to edit the file down to the correct length. Movie Maker allows you to fade in and fade out or you can put the fading in via Audacity. It’s up to you.

To insert the music, go to “timeline view” and you’ll see an area below the pictures for music (audio/music). Next, import the music file into Movie Maker and wait till the file appears at the top of the screen.

At this point, it’s a good idea to zoom in with the positive magnifying glass until you have one second intervals. Now drag the music file down into the “audio/ music” section until you have it at exactly the correct start and end positions.

When the music is in the right place, save it and play it back in the media player to make sure that it is all correct.

Finally, it’s time to export the video file. Go to File—>Save movie file in the top menu and you will have to make some selections as to the file name and where you want to put it in your computer. When you are finished and clicked “start”, it will begin transferring the saved movie file to your computer in WMV format. It is normally quite fast (5 minutes or less for me).

And that’s really it. As I said, there are other options and features (such as subtitles and narration) but I’ll let you discover them on your own. I just wanted to cover the basics to make a decent video but I’m sure you will find all the other stuff you can do. Or you can check Microsoft’s webpage on how to do stuff in Movie Maker.

How do you find Movie Maker? Is it one of the best in your opinion or does another program do it better? Having problems working out any of the features? If so, let us know in the comments.

**UPDATE** It has been brought to my attention that the Portable Movie Maker which was initially featured in this and the last article has a file which is being flagged by AVG as a virus. It is not a virus in my version of the program (which is how I didn’t find out about it before the publication of part one) but a subsequent check of a new download of the app does indeed reveal the file is being flagged by AVG.

To be on the safe side, all links and mentions of the portable app have been removed from this article. If you have already downloaded it, I suggest you delete it to be safe and use the full installed PC version of Movie Maker instead. Or at the very least scan your copy with a virus checker.

Normally we thoroughly virus check everything before publication. However, since I downloaded the portable app several weeks ago and AVG initially passed it as safe, this one got past me. I apologise.

Make Quick & Professional Looking Videos with Windows Movie Maker (Part 1)

Mark O'Neill — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 15:00:51 +0000

After buying a new camcorder, I was suddenly thrust into the fascinating world of video making & editing. These days, it is very easy to make professional-looking videos in as little as 15 minutes. After trying out a few programs, I finally settled on Windows Movie Maker and it is an absolute cinch to use.

If you are running Windows on your computer, Windows Movie Maker should also be installed by default. Just check your Start Menu to find it.

So let’s get started trying to become the next Quentin Tarantino…

First of all, you need a USB cable to connect your camcorder to your computer. Most modern camcorders come readily equipped with USB cables but if you don’t have one, you’ll have to buy one. You have to be able to transfer your film footage to your desktop. So first, connect your camcorder to the desktop with the USB cable.

Then run Movie Maker (MM).

To get started on making your video, the first step is to “capture” the video from your camera. So after making sure that your camcorder USB cable is in, go to “Capture from video device” in the left hand bar.

This will pop up a box asking you what you want to call your new video file and where in your computer you would like to store the video footage. Make your selections and then press “Next”.

This is the box that appears next. You have to decide if you want playback quality for your computer or if you plan to watch the footage on a DVD on television. This box also shows you how much space on your computer the movie file will take up as well as the file type (which is stuck on .wmv) and the file speed.

After making your decision and clicking next, the next box will ask you if you want to capture the whole tape or just portions of it. If you have used up a whole cassette on the same movie then you can just let MM capture the whole lot. But if you only want to capture part of the tape (perhaps if you have several movies on the same tape and you only want to work on one), choose the second option.

When you have made your decision, the capture box will come up. I took this screenshot from Google Images as I couldn’t get the video picture to show in my capture box screenshot. So please don’t think I am a toilet fetishist or something!

Everything here is pretty much self-explanatory. Keep the “Create clips when wizard finishes” option ticked. You can mute speakers if you want to (I don’t). You can also set a time limit on how much video it captures (but I don’t see the point as you can stop it yourself when you have what you need).

Before pressing “start capture”, use the controls under the picture to rewind / fast forward to the point you want to start capturing. Then press “Start capture”. You’ll then start to see “video captured” and “size of audio file” start to increase. Make sure you have enough space on your computer to store it all! When you have all the footage captured, press “Stop capture” and then the “Finish” button.

The footage will then be broken up into “clips”. This makes it a lot easier to edit the film and also get a general overview of the whole project.

To get started on editing it, highlight all the clips you want in your movie and then drag it to the bottom into the timeline. Everything will then be moved down and you’re ready to begin editing.

That’s all for part one. In part two, I will show you how to edit your footage and also add in some special effects such as adding AVI and WMV movie files as well as music and credits.

**UPDATE** It has been brought to my attention that the Portable Movie Maker which was initially featured in this article has a file which is being flagged by AVG as a virus. It is not a virus in my version of the program (which is how I didn’t find out about it before the publication of this article) but a subsequent check of a new download of the app does indeed reveal the file is being flagged by AVG.

Normally we thoroughly virus check everything before publication. However, since I downloaded this app several months ago and AVG initially passed it as safe, this one got past me. I apologise.

How to Easily Compress Video Files for Web with Movie Maker

Damien Oh — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 14:31:11 +0000

Without a doubt, the advancement in technology and faster Internet connection have enabled people to share their home made video with others more quickly and easily. Be it the video you took during your travel or a video of your baby’s birthday, with few simple clicks, you can get it online and attract thousands of viewers instantly.

One thing though, before you upload that video of yours, it is important to get it compressed to the smallest possible size so that your movie can be more easily watched by people over the Web. Luckily, you do not need to be a tech guru to be able to compress your video files. If you are using Windows XP and above (excluding Windows 7), you already have a great tool in your Start menu that allows you to compress video files for web easily – Windows Movie Maker.

For some reasons, if your computer does not come with the Window Movie Maker, you can download it from the Microsoft website for a price of FREE.

In this tutorial, I am going to illustrate how you can compress a video file for web to half its size with Windows Movie Maker.

As seen for the screenshot below, the video file that I used for this tutorial is of size 61.8MB. Let’s see how much we are able to compress by the end of this tutorial.

Open up your Windows Movie Maker. Click on the Import Video link on the left pane.

Select the video file that you want to compress and import it into Windows Movie Maker.

Drag the movie to the timeline.

If you want to edit and add effects to your movie, you are free to carry on. If not, proceed on by going to File->Save Movie File.

Select a location in your computer.

When it comes to the Movie Setting page, check the box “Other settings” and select “Video for broadband (340 Kbps)” in the dropdown option.

Alternatively, you can also choose the Video for broadband (512 Kbps) options, which mean the video will be streamed at a higher bitrate (and a bigger file size).

Click Next to start compressing the video file. It will take sometime while the Movie Maker compresses and saves the video file.

The Result

The following image is the screenshot of the video file after compression. You can see that there is a whopping 64% reduction in the video files.

Conclusion

To say the truth, Windows Movie Maker is nowhere comparable to a professional video editor software. However, taking into account that not everyone is a tech guru, Windows Movie Maker has done a great job in simplifying the process of compressing video file for web and make it easy for almost everyone to use.

As can be seen from the tutorial above, it is VERY easy to compress a video for the web and the result is impressive. Best of all, it comes preinstalled in your computer, so there is no need to search, download and install. Though it is not the best, i don’t have much complaint about it.

What about you?