Windows Movie Maker on XP netbooks

[SimpleSi]

Came across a problem today that I'd not noticed before using WMM to add narration to a stop-animation.

Some of the pupils reported that when they played back their imported video (from a specialist stop-animation capture prog) it skipped some frames in the preview window which made it tricky to add their dialog.

In all cases (bar one of course!) if I slowed the video down by adding the reduce by half speed video effect, the frame skipping went away.

On the one that was left I had to give up and let them use the main teacher computer.

Anyone seen this thing happen and was there any magic cure.

For info - y imported videos are in Huffyuv avi format.

regards
Simon

[Michael]

Are the AVIs high quality or large in size? I suppose depending on the machine specs, this could be creating a problem.

[SimpleSi]

Thats certainly something to look at - they are prob 640x320 - I can control what my stop-animation prog outputs (modified Helium Frog) and 320x240 will be fine as they are normally viewed on a school website anyway.

I'd just never noticed this behaviour before - I'll need to try it out on some other type of netbooks(these were ASUS ones) and see what happens.

The pupils normally end up reducing the frame rate by half as they don't take enough intital shots but I am mystified as why one of them wouldn't play ball even with the reduced frame rate

Si

[glennda]

Could be something with the graphics cards, I've seen a few netbooks which tend to do strange things with videos - although never tried in movie maker.

[Michael]

I'll need to try it out on some other type of netbooks(these were ASUS ones) and see what happens.

I suppose that's another clue. You're using netbooks, so I am guessing a wireless connection too? Large files and wireless don't work well together. Graphics on netbooks are typically of the shared variety, but they're still quite powerful bearing in mind how small they are.