Part 2 of 4
Based on our prior tutorial, I am assuming you have your video read into Microsoft Movie Maker and are ready to start creating individual movies.
I am well aware of the danger of “assuming” but I have to start somewhere. If you are struggling with getting your video captured and onto your PC, leave a comment and let me know. I’ll see if I can provide more detailed instruction.
By creating individual movies, I mean a single movie for each song performed. In the video I am working with for this tutorial, there are 5 songs.
- Do It Again
- Is It Too Late (still need to upload this video)
- Everyday Lies
- I’ll Make You Feel
- Morning Girl
If, by chance, you have a video camera that produces a movie file, you can import that file into Movie Maker. This will also create a Collection with the same name as your movie file.
What is a Collection?
It is a folder or container in Movie Maker for media that you have created or imported. It can hold images, movies, and audio.
You can (and should) create a collection for any images you will use repeatedly in your videos. I have a collection where I have video intro plates – branded for marketing purposes.
You can create movies using media (images and movies) from any of your collections – you don’t need to “import” the same image into every “collection” created when you capture or import video.
Note: When you import your movie, select File->Import into Collection
Make sure you uncheck the “Create clips for video files”
Clips are video segments. Movie Maker will create breaks based on what it believes are transition points in your video. However, we are going to manually create our own clips or segments based on the beginning and ending of a particular song or segment of our performance.
If we allow Movie Maker to create clips for us, it will arbitrarily generate segments based on changes in lighting or audio breaks. The image below shows the Movie Maker collections window after importing a video with the “create clips for video files” checked. It created 68 clips or video segments for the 20 minutes of video.
click image for a larger view
As I have said above, I have 5 total songs in this section of video – so 68 clips is far too many.
Fortunately, the original file is in-tact. Clips are virtual breaks or space holders in Movie Maker. Any captured or imported video remains in its completed form on your harddrive.
Also, you do not have to re-import your movie to bring it in as a single clip. You can highlight all the segments and select “Combine” from the “Clip” menu or right mouse-click and select “Combine”. This will combine the clips back into a single clip.
click image for a larger view
Creating Clips
Movie Maker, like most video editing software, has a timeline (bottom pane), the media pane (upper left), and the preview pane (upper right). We are not yet working with the timeline.
By highlighting our section of video, we can preview the video in the preview pane. We will be finding the beginning and ending of each song in my performance and creating a clip – or splitting the video at that point.
I don’t need to be 100% precise. In fact, I will leave some room at the start and ending of each song so I can fade in and out later. To find the break points, I can watch the entire movie or drag the movie placement control in the preview pane.
Once we find a good place to break our clip, we can select “Clip->Split” from the menu or press the “Split” icon on the preview window.
The Split icon looks like: 
Pressing it will cause your video in the Collection window to split into two segments.
click image for a larger view
By default the two segments will keep the same name, with the second segment adding a numeric value. However, to make our clips easier to keep track of, we will rename each segment for the song it contains. As mentioned above, the first song is “Do It Again”.
I highlight the first segment, press F2, and type “Do It Again”.
Now I can do the same for the rest of the songs. Simply go through my clip, find the ending of each song, give myself a few seconds to fade out, and split the segment and rename. When complete, I am left with a collection screen with 5 individual segments or clips like below.
click image for a larger view
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If you’ve gotten this far, you are well on your way to creating your performance videos. I’ve got to run to do some consulting and make some coffee.
Coming next: Your branded video intro plate & your first movie
Songwriter, author, and consultant. Writing about tools I use or I have watched others use successfully. 
