You probably heard that video is best for generating free traffic to your website. Well, it’s true…:)
But if you want to have a video for promotion of your business you need to make it and here I will present you how to make YouTube video with this free video maker – Windows Movie Maker.
If you don’t have a good quality digital camera, good audio equipment or editing tool or you simply don’t have much money to buy all that stuff, which can be pretty expensive (by the way), what else you can do?
Now…
Windows Movie Maker is an elegant solution if you plan to make videos by yourself and to do it absolutely free.
It needed a little practice, but the program is really simple to use.
Inserting Images
When you install and start Windows Movie Maker you will end up on the screen like this:
The screen is divided into 3 segments, upper is control segment, on the left side you have the large preview of your video and on the right side will be your Images, videos, music, and text which you will be arranging.
The first thing you wanna do is to insert all your images, so prepare them in some folder for easy managing. Click on Add videos and photos
From your folder right click on the mouse and select all or select one and then press Ctrl+A and then click Open.
Arrange the order of your images by clicking on the image you wish to move and dragging them. Remove images by clicking on them, then click on right button of your mouse and select remove.
Here are images and order I choose for my video:
For the video wish to made use your own images or you can take screenshots or you can find free images on:
Special Effects
If you want special effects for your images you can use Transitions between slides or Visual Effects
Go to Animations and with the mouse pointer hover over transition animations to choose which are best suits for your slide. Choose one transition and click on Apply to all or you can choose different transition for each image. Expand transition field with arrow pointing down at the end of the row.
You can also apply all of that for Pan and Zoom section on the right side.
With Visual Effect you can alter your images in the way to have some contrast or add some special effect.
Under the Project you can do audio mix, you can choose do you wish to narration be louder than video and music, to music be louder than
video and narration, to video be louder than narration and music or to choose no emphasize. Also, you can choose to music fit to video slides and which type of screen you wish to make.
Under View menu you can zoom in and zoom out, change the size of image preview and to show wave forms of audio.
In Edit section you can modify audio fade in and fade out, duration of image been shown (automatically is set on 7 seconds). Easily change which image will be shown for how long time by clicking on the image and change duration.
You can even split video in some sections or set start and end point.
If you select your animations and effects we can go on to the next point of creating a video.
Adding Music
Click on Home and select Add music, then upload music from your PC or you can find free royalty music:
By adding music, audio will be shown under your images and it will be automatically the same length as your images like shown in this screenshot:
Now you can play your whole video and see does everything work in order or change fade in and fade out for your audio.
If you want, you can even watch your video and record narration by telling the story in your own words for your movie.
Adding Text for Your Video
To add text to your images you just need to click on the image where you wish text to appear and click on Caption like you see in this image below
The text editor will appear and then you can enter text you wish to appear on selected image.
After you enter your desired text you can Adjust duration and start time. Start and watch your video to see does text appear in the right moment. If not, just change the start time or displaying duration of your text.
On the right upper side, beside text editor you have special effects for your text – entrance and exit of your text.
Saving Your Video
Save your video at any time and continue working on it later by saving it like any other file. Click on File > Save As > “Name of your video”.
But once you finish your video you want to save it in the right format for playing on different platforms, so you need to go to Save Movie and then choose in which format you want to save it. I suggest you chose YouTube format from drop down menu.
Now you can enjoy your movie and share it wherever you like
P.S. Once you save your movie you won’t be able to change it. You can only change your project you saved like file.
Conclusion
Windows Movie Maker is a great free tool you can use for making your videos or making special effects to your existing videos. You can use web cam to record your video and if you have great microphone you can easily record narration for your video.
It doesen’t matter if you don’t have much experience in making videos because this tool is newbie friendly and you can use it to practice. Start with some small project, practice and experiment with all functions available and most of all, have fun.
This tool can be introduction in some great production of your own movie company…:)
Wish you much fun and a lot of movies.
If you have any questions or unclear or want to add something to this topic, feel free to leave a comment below and I will be more than happy to discuss it.