Movie Maker export issues - ASAP

[bondbill2k2]

Our year11s are finishing off their OCR Nationals and as the final unit they are editing videos using movie maker. Most of them have completed their movie maker projector but now must export the video but blasted movie maker is not playing ball! Almost all students are having export problems at different percentages of the export process. Some I have sorted by looking at what stage it freezes finding the video at that stage of the timeline and using a video converter to WMV, write over the old file and it exports fine however the previous files did say WMV, imported into movie maker fine and played back fine.

Others I have done as stated above but still have the issue, videos have been added by students and teachers to both their documents and a shared area on a NAS. They also have audio over the entire clips. With deadlines at the end of this week its taking too long to play around each students movie project to correct problems and I could really do with a fix or finding the reason WHY!!!!

*rage quits the class*

[plexer]

We have had the same thing and never found a cure for it now bought Serif Movie Plus for video editing.

Ben

[Steve21]

One of the big issues I've found with movie maker (not sure if it's fixed in the latest ones or not) is that it stores the entire file to ram before exporting it fully. Thus breaking on pretty much any decent length movies.

Generally just stick it onto our video editting machines which have the RAM to support it

Steve

[Pete10141748]

I could really do with a fix or finding the reason WHY!!!!

as the final unit they are editing videos using movie maker

There's your reason. MovieMaker sucks, it just sucks. It crashes all the time even when making small videos let alone whole projects.


Sorry, I know that's not an answer to your problem but for the future I really would look at getting a better video editing program.

[themightymrp]

Any chance you can up the RAM to the max the machines will take i.e. 4Gb if its 32bit ? The extra RAM might help it render to the end of the vid?

[CyberDrac]

Check to see if they are using .MP3s, if they are, try re-encoding them as .WMA or .WAV and try again , it worked with a few of our students.

[ste1988]

I remember having a problem in the past where it required something of windows media player to do the encoding, and updating to the very lastest windows media player solved the issue. long shot i know but maybe worth a shout?

[Sam_Brown]

Check to see if they are using .MP3s, if they are, try re-encoding them as .WMA or .WAV and try again , it worked with a few of our students.

I'm going to go with this and also add that if they are using AVI \ MPG as the videos then to convert to WMV as well.

[Lee91]

I'm going to go with this and also add that if they are using AVI \ MPG as the videos then to convert to WMV as well.

Try removing any codec packs you have, I've know them to cause problems with WMM before...If you don't have any codec packs try installing K-Lite codec pack as, stangely, this has fixed some of my WMM woes in the past.

Good luck!

Also look for any clips that are "muted" - If there are any untick the mute box and just drag the volume slider to the bottom. Random I know but it's worked for me before.

[BJG]

Plenty problems with Movie Maker here too. I bookmarked this thread the other day meaning to check out some of these freebie suggestions like AVI Demux.

Freeware video editing software?

[CyberDrac]

I also found that introducing codec packs (including k-lite which I would swear by for all other playback uses) introduced stability issues (it was explained to me that the codecs tend to focus only on the decoding and are not as mature on the encoding side), equally .AVI files tended to work provided that they were 'proper' AVI files rather than one of the more modern codecs that shared the extension.

[AButters]

Movie maker for XP is a steaming pile of.... you know.

It lulls you into a false sense of security with a nice simple interface that makes you think, hey this is great easy for pupils to use and is free. How awesome!!

Only 6 months down the road does it make it's true intentions clear when you try to get coursework ready and it crashes every 5 minutes.

We too have Serif Movieplus here to use from Sept onwards.

[Sylv3r]

We used to have loads of problems with Movie Maker back in the day. We now use Adobe Premiere Elements and Magix Movie maker.... and have equally as many problems if not more. None of them seem to play nicely on networks.

[bondbill2k2]

Well I began converting some that students had in their homeshares to wmv and replace the previous files with them but movie maker said the video is too different from the original to replace it. It looks like most the students wrote '.wmv' at the end of each file regardless of file type thinking that would make them wmv several are MPEG and some audio files are .m4a's. I think most of them came from youtube down-loaders so god knows which they used and the format they default save as. I have tryed to educate people on files come in different types much like people speak different languages and some software works like a translator but It falls on death ears. I've given students and staff the software to convert it themselves (formatfactory) converted those in the NAS share and explained to the IT teachers what to do. Next year provide them with a set number of resources and a scenario to make a movie for, the source youre own media option was a bad idea!

[ste1988]

Well I began converting some that students had in their homeshares to wmv and replace the previous files with them but movie maker said the video is too different from the original to replace it. It looks like most the students wrote '.wmv' at the end of each file regardless of file type thinking that would make them wmv several are MPEG and some audio files are .m4a's. I think most of them came from youtube down-loaders so god knows which they used and the format they default save as. I have tryed to educate people on files come in different types much like people speak different languages and some software works like a translator but It falls on death ears. I've given students and staff the software to convert it themselves (formatfactory) converted those in the NAS share and explained to the IT teachers what to do. Next year provide them with a set number of resources and a scenario to make a movie for, the source youre own media option was a bad idea!

Thats how we did it here, heres some video, heres some audio, now you have to make a trailer etc.

For those who have any issues with creating movies with pupils, i cant recommend serif movieplus enough.

Its extremely stable compared to others, and nice and easy for staff and pupils to use, with enough inbuilt resources to make a decent looking movie. It strikes a nice balance between super basic like movie maker to the professional movie editing stuff from adobe.