Isn't everything bigger in Texas? So we're off to Houston to the National Middle School Association Annual Conference where we will present "Lights, Camera, Action!" to Middle School teachers on Saturday. Of course in order to present a workshop on "How to use Moviemaker" we had to get new toys!! Hence the new Vista install, and the new Macbook. We're hoping to buy a new projector, too. So....the conference in Connecticut was the warm up act.... We now have our act together, and the Keynote presentation is smashing!! No wonder Macs are so popular!! I am trying really hard not to run to the store to buy my Macbook Pro until I, at the very least, open up the brand new Dell that is sitting on my office floor. Yes, I got it aweek ago and it is still in the boxes:(
So while we've been slaving at night to get the documentation and notes finished, I came across some fantastic websites that actually answered the questions in my Presentation From Hell post. The best sight for Moviemaker users is: http://www.windowsmoviemakers.net website. Pretty much it is everything you ever wanted to know about Windows Moviemaker, both the XP version and the Vista version. There are forums for EVERYTHING including posts by users named Rehan and Swami who are constantly creating new Moviemaker transitions and effects to download.
One very cool website I found filled with tons of links and ideas as well as downloads is: http://movies.blainesville.com/ Who knew you could do all this cool stuff with moviemaker...a free program?
Another avid moviemaker is Papajohn who you can find hangin' out at http://www.papjohn.org
Well, the answer to the movie that plays audio but no video, is codecs. Codec is short for compression/decompression. I found the answer to my question and a ton of useful information on the MSDN website, (Microsft Developer Network) including the Microsoft Photoblog http://blogs.msdn.com/pix/archive/2007/03/21/movie-maker-vista-file-format-support.aspx
One thing I learned is that just because the format is supported, doesn't mean the codec is installed on the machine There are hundreds of codecs. One of the most popular video formats is AVI..but AVI is not a codec , but a container for a wide range of video codecs! It's all a bit confusing. If you go to Microsoft's Windows Media Player faq page http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/player/faq/codec.mspx you can get an explanation that maybe you can understand.
So that's all for now....I need to go make a movie, and hope that all my codecs are installed. I wish I had this information a year ago! If i had known everyone else was as confused as I was, and that there really is no magic answer, I would have felt a lot better.
The questions just never go away, do they.?..They kind of multiply and take on a life of their own. Some questions are easy and the answers are simple. Sometimes you think you have the right question, but as you look for the answer your question reinvents itself. And sometimes you discover questions you never knew you had.....put it on the clipboard...it will never really go away.
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