I love making music videos. It's one of those things that I once thought I would never have the patience and expertise for, but it's actually easier than I ever expected it to be.
At the end of the day, when I don't have enough brainpower to write anymore, but I want to do something creative and watch it come together bit by bit, making a music vid is a really easy, relaxing way to finish off the day.
Until suddenly it isn't.
At the end of the day, when I don't have enough brainpower to write anymore, but I want to do something creative and watch it come together bit by bit, making a music vid is a really easy, relaxing way to finish off the day.
Until suddenly it isn't.
I'll admit, there were a couple times when I feared I would have to scrap the whole hobby, because what had once been fun and relaxing was becoming a pain in the neck. Fortunately, I found ways to fix those problems, so now I want to share them with you, just in case you've run into any of those issues.
1. When you get the clip you need, make a copy.
Don't just start editing it. You could end up splitting or removing something you want, or trimming the start and end points only to have the clip turn out to be too short to match the music.
Instead, copy the clip, then paste the copy where you want it, and edit the copy. Yes, you'll have to remove the original clip afterwards, but that's far less of a hassle that having to find and import the clip all over again or undo your work because you accidentally ruined it.
2. Be careful how many clips you use.
In one of my more complex MVs, when it was rapidly moving from one clip to another and thus had a high number of clips, the files started to get corrupted. At first it was only after I'd been editing for a while, then it was after just a few clicks... after a while, I couldn't even play the video without Movie Maker saying it was corrupt. That was the glitch that made me fear that my hobby wasn't going to work out.
Then I tried to run another project with fewer clips, and it worked just fine. It was simply the case that my more complex project was overloading the system.
How do you fix that, without removing necessary clips from your project? Save it as a .AVI file. This will convert the whole thing into a single video file, so when you import it back into Movie Maker, it will only have one file to think about instead of dozens of fragments from lots of different ones. With fewer plates to spin, it should work more smoothly.
3. An easy way to avoid clip overload in the first place:
Sometimes, when you need to have a transition between scenes to keep time with the drum beats or lyrics in a song, you can use the preexisting scene cuts in the clip itself.
If the video you're working with cuts from one scene to another, or changes camera angle, or something like that, see if you can time it so that the scene change matches the rhythm or lyrics you're trying to time it to.
By using a single clip as footage for two adjacent verses or drum beats, you give Movie Maker less to think about, and less reason to corrupt all your files in an act of self-defense.
There you go! Three handy tips to keep Movie Maker from driving you crazy.
Do you have any tips you'd like to share?
If you share my enjoyment of making music videos, and you have a tip or a glitch fix that you'd like to share, I'd love to hear about it in the comments. It might just save me some frustration in the near future.
There you go! I hope my tips helped, and I look forward to reading yours.
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