Movie Maker refuses to show a movie's entire length in timeline

[Guest]

I have a clip roughly 2 hour 20 minute long. After I insert it into the
timeline it is only 1 hour and 40 minutes long - why can't I access the final
40 minutes of my clip? I can't even drag the end of my clip in the timeline
to get that content myself. This is extremely frusterating

When I captured my file I was snagged by my previous use of the application
where I told it to stop capturing at 1 hour 40 minutes. So I deleted that
file, disabled that option, and restarted. My new clip is definately around
2 hours 20 minutes because that's what it shows in Media Player and Media
Player allows me to view the end of the clip that Movie Maker refuses access
to.

What gives? I've tried renaming my file and Movie Maker still refuses to
allow me to use the entire clip. Even the tooltip in the palette fails to
show the true length and instead gives me 1:40:00!

 

[Guest]

Here's what you need to do. Go to this folder:
C:\Documents and Settings\<user>\Local Settings\Application
Data\Microsoft\Movie Maker\

(Where <user> is the name of the current user of the system)

Then delete the contents of that folder. In my case it had the file
MEDIATAB0.DAT. Apparently this file caches information on the different
imported media files and does a miserable job in determining when a file was
changed (Here's a suggestion, if the filename changes that should imply that
the cache information in the file should be changed!)

This is a nasty bug. What if I had only wanted to cut off some content from
the beginning instead of the ends? I would have had no idea until far later
in my project that Movie Maker failed to show the entire contents of my clip
until much later. Thankfully I caught this early and it only caused me a
frustration level 7 out of 10 instead of a 10 out of 10.

The moral of this story is to never, ever, ever, EVER assume anything when
editing video. Had I assumed Movie Maker was properly recognizing the length
of my movie I would have been screwed. You have to check, and doublecheck
every single thing with a video editing project before assuming things are
OK. This is not just because of program errors, but it's very easy to make
simple user errors (like I did with having my clip automatically stop
capturing).

In video editing, measure two thousand times and cut once!

 

[Guest]

Here's what you need to do. Go to this folder:
C:\Documents and Settings\<user>\Local Settings\Application
Data\Microsoft\Movie Maker\

(Where <user> is the name of the current user of the system)

Then delete the contents of that folder. In my case it had the file
MEDIATAB0.DAT. Apparently this file caches information on the different
imported media files and does a miserable job in determining when a file was
changed (Here's a suggestion, if the filename changes that should imply that
the cache information in the file should be changed!)

This is a nasty bug. What if I had only wanted to cut off some content from
the beginning instead of the ends? I would have had no idea until far later
in my project that Movie Maker failed to show the entire contents of my clip
until much later. Thankfully I caught this early and it only caused me a
frustration level 7 out of 10 instead of a 10 out of 10.

The moral of this story is to never, ever, ever, EVER assume anything when
editing video. Had I assumed Movie Maker was properly recognizing the length
of my movie I would have been screwed. You have to check, and doublecheck
every single thing with a video editing project before assuming things are
OK. This is not just because of program errors, but it's very easy to make
simple user errors (like I did with having my clip automatically stop
capturing).

In video editing, measure two thousand times and cut once!

 

[Guest]

Thanks so much, this tip was a lifesaver!

 

[Guest]

Yes, thank you! It would only recognize and make clips of the first 30
seconds or so. what a pain!!