Can't save as WMV

[Guest]

I have made a short movie on Movie Maker 2.0, just over three minutes long,
the total number of clips is 77 and the total number of effects is 42. When I
click Save Movie As, everything works fine with the destination and Best Fit
for My Computer and everything, the movie as a .wmv would be just over 47mb
and I have approx. 21 gigabytes free.

But it WILL NOT SAVE. It freezes on the 'start save' menu/screen for a
while, then goes to the screen with the estimated time remaining. No
estimated time or % ever shows up, the bar never gets started, and sooner or
later the 'cannot save to specified location' file comes up.

No matter how small a movie I make - even those that consist of one 4kb jpeg
picture - will not save as a .wmv.

My movie saves perfectly fine as an .avi, and that would be acceptable
except for the fact it takes up 665mb, which to me is far less acceptable.

I've been to Papa John's site and the 'can't save a movie' page and did the
bits that I could understand (which admittedly wasn't much) but it seemed
that not a lot applied to my particular situation since a lot depended on
being able to save small files first.

I've tried to find the location of Movie Maker, but it does not appear on
the add/remove programs list, and I didn't notice the actual program when
searching for it. I thought maybe uninstalling and reinstalling it could
help, but when you can't find the program file to uninstall there's not a lot
that can be done.

Please can somebody help, I've been trying solidly for a week trying to save
this movie.

 

[John Kelly]

Hello,

It sounds as though MM has come up against a problem with the
project....this might be because you have a file that is not best suied to
MM or you might have a codec problem.

Some versions of JPeg still images cause MM a serious problem
I once discovered a title with just one character (a space) caused the
same problem as yours...it was so small I did not at first realise I had not
previously deleted
MP3 music files can cause problems

So, convert any JPeg files to BMP (Bitmap), MP3 files to WAV or WMA and
check up on any titles you have.

If this does no good the next step would be to install Service Pack 2.
But note that computers with older equipment may not function as they used
to once you do that. Next step install the latest DirectX and Codec pack
from Microsoft.

If all of that fails consider a 10lb lump hammer...the longer handle
variety seem to work best, you can get more of a swing with it

Additional. If after reading the MIcrosoft site on SP2 you decide that your
hardware will be OK you would do well to install SP2 anyway. There are
several good reasons for doing that one of which is the upgrade to version
2.1 of Movie Maker

Best Wishes.....John Kelly
www.the-kellys.org