This section shows you how to capture and import the ingredients you need to cook up a home movie. They are:

• Video clips
• Pictures
• Music

They are called source files. The first step to making a home movie is to import these source files into the movie-editing software (which is Movie Maker for this course). If the video clip, picture or music is not imported into Movie Maker, it can’t be included as part of your home movie.



NOTES
Whatever you do in Movie Maker, trimming video clips, add slow motion effects, brightening pictures, cutting short the music – whatever you do in Movie Maker, it does not affect, touch, damage your original source files on your PC hard drive.

What is the difference between Source files, a Movie Maker Project and a Saved Movie?

• Source files are the actual raw video footage ( e.g. avi, wma files), still pictures (e.g. jpg or gif files) or sound file (e.g. .mp3 files). When you import the source files into Movie Maker, they appear in the Collections pane as icons of video clips, pictures or sound files. Although they look like the real mcCoy, they are just representations or pointers to the actual source files. This is why, you can cut, speed up, slow down, mutilate the clips in Movie Maker and your source files remain untouched.
• Think of a Movie Maker Project as a movie director’s script of what the movie timeline looks like - which clip appears first, which music goes with it, which pictures pop up followed by which video clip? They are instructions. When you save a Movie Maker Project (the file extension is .MSWMM), you are saving the storyboard timeline. Next time you open the project, it knows how to put together your movie again. ASSUMING you have not moved the source files to new locations.
• A Saved Movie is the final edited movie. When you are done putting together your project, replay it in the Preview window. If you are happy with it, you are ready to Save Movie. The output of your Save Movie is a video file that can be played independently by Windows Media Player or other players such as Real Player or Quicktime. This is the file that you burn on DVDs to share with your friends or upload to the web. This file is your final video movie file, the reward of all your hard work.

BIG TIP: When you are in the middle of making a movie, do not move your source files around. This is because a Movie Maker project does not make copies of the source files but merely link to the source files. AFTER you have saved your project into a final movie file, you may move or delete the source files.