Edit, catalog, and e-mail your home movies

When it comes to making home movies, most of us are amateurs. We may talk while filming, shoot events out of focus, or jiggle the camera every so often. With Windows Movie Maker, it’s easy to cut out the goofs so you can relive the best of your on-camera memories. Once Windows Movie Maker digitizes your videos, you can save them to CD, or better yet, e-mail your favorite video shorts to family and friends. You can even post them on participating Web sites!

In Windows Movie Maker you can:

• Store your entire home-video collection on your computer.
• Arrange selected clips in the order of your choosing.
• Fade or dissolve between clips.
• Incorporate slides, background music, sound effects, and voice-over narration into your movie.
• Store more than 20 hours of video per gigabyte of hard drive space.
• With an inexpensive adapter, import video footage from older analog camcorders.
• Import video footage from newer digital-video camcorders using an IEEE-1394 interface adapter.
• Find your original, pre-edited footage quickly and play it back. This is easy to do because everything is catalogued and organized with Windows Movie Maker.
• Find any shot in minutes by scanning the stored still frames in the Windows Movie Maker workspace or folders.
• Create a slide show of still images.

Once you’re done editing, view your movies in Windows Media Player, which is a feature of Windows Me and can be downloaded for free from the Windows Media Player Web site onto any computer running Windows 95 or later.