won't save my movie

[Guest]

Help says movies can be saved "quickly" but when I try to save mine (which is about 1 1/2 hour long) and leave it going all night, the next morning it's only about 45% completed, and a couple of hours later it's still only 45% completed. What's a reasonable time to wait to save a movie, a week???

 

[John Kelly]

Hello there,

Using other software, I have had to wait for almost two days before a movie
is created and that particular one was only an hour long.

Movie Maker can not make movies that complex, so something is amiss. How
quickly those things happen will obviously depend on what you have in your
movie. The two items that will slow down your video the quickest are
Transitions and effects. It has been my experience that Movie Maker can
take an inordinate amount of time if any one part of the video has multiple
effects. The system I run My movie software on has 1.5GB of fast DDR RAM
and 320GB of fairly fast hard drive etc and if you go overboard you can
bring the system down to a crawl.

The above is not always the problem. A small program fragment called a
Codec can cause Movie Maker to stall. It gives the appearance that the
program is still working, memory programs will even indicate that the CPU
is running full speed, but, it will not be making your video.

There are also situations with the amount of RAM and hard drive space that
will definitely cause a problem. Basically not having enough will cause it.
It is said that a system with 512MB of RAM is ideal, but I have seen that
when the program is running it will consume 540MB of RAM and even then
still tries to use Virtual Memory

To start the remedy process I would suggest you do the following as a
start...

1) Download the FULL versions of DIRECTX 9.0b and Windows Media Player 9
2) Reboot the machine and install DirectX
3) Reboot again and install Windows Media Player
4) Finally reboot again and try Movie Maker.

The reason for the reboots is to ensure that the OS has properly released
any file locks which would otherwise prevent the overwriting of any file.

As I said above, it could be a codec that is causing you a problem, I doubt
it but in any case you might as well illuminate it as a possible cause. You
can download a program called "Rename Codecs" which I wrote from my
website. It is used by more than 100 people to routinely disable certain
known problem Codecs, and to restore them afterwards. There is also a
tutorial on my site which is semi interactive showing you what to do...it
will take around one minute to read...its very simple (Like Me)

If you suspect either RAM or disk drive being the problem do please check
out the FAQ on Movie Maker and the tutorial on hard drives on my site

If all of these thoughts fail to help, do please ask again and also include
your machine type, RAM and Hard drive space.

--
Best Wishes.....John Kelly
www.the-kellys.org
www.the-kellys.co.uk
All material gained from other sources is duly acknowledged. No Value is
obtained by publishing in any format other peoples work

 

[PapaJohn \(MVP\)]

There's a number of things it could be. See the Problem Solving > Can't Save
a Movie page of my website.
--
PapaJohn

Movie Maker 2 - www.papajohn.org
Photo Story 2 - www.photostory.papajohn.org

..

Help says movies can be saved "quickly" but when I try to save mine (which

is about 1 1/2 hour long) and leave it going all night, the next morning
it's only about 45% completed, and a couple of hours later it's still only
45% completed. What's a reasonable time to wait to save a movie, a week???

 

[Dave W]

Hi,

I have had the same problem with long and/or complex
movie projects, and have had to do some troubleshooting
to figure out why. MM2 is hanging at 45% of the way
through the saving process of your movie. Check your
project at 45% of the way through your time line (45% of
90 minutes = 40.5 minutes). Do you have something
unusual going on at that point in your project? i.e. a
music or video clip at that point that may be corrupt?
Sometimes you can identify the clip causing the problem,
remove it, and save the movie successfully.

If the problem cannot be easily spotted, try splitting
your MM2 project at the 45% point. Save each of the two
sections independantly. Note that you can rejoin them if
you save back to a DV tape. This has solved similar
problems for me.

Hope this helps.
Dave

-----Original Message-----
Help says movies can be saved "quickly" but when I try

to save mine (which is about 1 1/2 hour long) and leave
it going all night, the next morning it's only about 45%
completed, and a couple of hours later it's still only
45% completed. What's a reasonable time to wait to save
a movie, a week???

 

[John Kelly]

Hi Dave W,

Good remarks.

Best Wishes.....John Kelly
www.the-=kellys.org
www.the-kellys.co.uk