Windows Movie Maker

[The Rev]

I have found that WMM tends to resize AVIs and/or compress them in ways that tend to ruin their visual quality.  I'm all for compression, but I would like a bit more control over the codec I use, and output file type, etc.  Is there a way to get more control out of WMM, or should I be looking at other software?  I like the ability to place sound files where I want, and storyboard more than one AVI file, but the loss of end product quality makes it not worth it.

Thanks,

The Rev

[thepookster]

I have been working on composing some fractal videos lately and have found that I get the best results when I export the video from whatever program I am using as uncompressed.  I then import the composed clip into VirtualDub and use that to encode the video for final distrobution.  VirtualDub is free and is FAR superior for encoding that WMM could ever hope to be.  Now this is only going to be an option if WMM allows you to export the video as uncompressed, also size limitations and disk space can be a major issue as an ~8 minute uncompressed video can be several GB's in size.  If you have a fairly modern computer and a decent amount of free disk space (and non FAT32 file system), this shouldn't be an issue.

As an extremely picky videophile myself, I really try to only do a single lossy compression for any video I create.  As fractal videos are notoriously hard to compress, while creating and composing the footage I always work in uncompressed or lossless codecs (HuffYUV is a great one) untill I do the final export for distrobution.

Hope this helps.

-Thepookster

[panzerboy]

My votes for VirtualDub too. I tend to Xvid my videos, but I do a two pass. I'm uploading into Youtube and that makes them look like crap anyway. If I ever do anything tricky I'll use VirtualDub. It has a nice 'direct stream copy' copy mode that doesn't recompress but allows you to swap the audio, append video and trim (I think limited to keys frames, Ie you cant insert a interpolated frame as its calculated from the last key frame).

[tomot]

I'm Arriving a bit late to this subject. I just d/led MMW for windows 7. It only saves to .wmv format.
and I just discovered VirtualDub-1.9.11-AMD6 wont import the .wmv format. (ASF files are not supported)

However I discovered my favorite movie player: http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
can play .wmv,  and can also convert to .mov
then if you like to play in .avi format, just rename the file extension .avi

cheers!