Movie save progress stops

J

John

Hello. I am having some trouble with Windows Movie Maker, the stock version
that comes with Windows XP. I recently reinstalled this system, and have all
my hardware and drivers installed properly and working fine. I have 13 MPEG
video files that I have 'imported' into the Maker's Collections and Workspace
panes. Each video file is about 3:30 minutes long. Some of the imported
file-pieces, I have edited, split or removed. More or less each of the
thirteen video files are complete. Of these files, I have dragged the content
I want from the Workspace, to the new movie timeline. After the content I
want is in the timeline, I select Save Movie from the File menu, and choose a
video profile of low dimensions and at least 30 frames per second. I have
plenty of disk space for the final file. Then I save and wait. I realize that
the creation process will take awhile, so I step away from the computer for
awhile.

My computer has several gigabytes of unused disk space, 1GB of system
memory, and an AMD 3Ghz processor. So, I figure my system specs are good
enough for this simple production. Well, after i've been away from the
computer for over an hour, I find that the status bar isn't even half
progressed. I go away for awhile longer and the progress bar hasnt even
increased by one bar. I am quite confident that after over an hours length of
time, my created movie should be finished and ready to view. I have nothing
but my system volume control loaded on my taskbar/tray and my Task Manager
shows hardly anything more than the standard processes. Usually between 16
and 20 processes. But, after having waited so long, I make a copy of the
temporary movie file, and click cancel on the progress dialog. I attempt to
view the created video clip and it is not even complete, of course. The video
is just less than half created. I believe that the system has had more than
enough time to create this film, as well as an overabundance of available
resources. Nothing of major draw is running in the 'background'. The only
resource hog is the Movie Maker. I even check the Task Manager performance
tab, and just a few hundred megabytes (less than 500) of my pagefile are
being used and there is hardly and usage of the CPU.

SO, I am wondering here, why Movie Maker isn't combining these video files
properly into one singular video. Am I doing something wrong? Does each file
have to specifically fit together like a jigsaw puzzle, like M+O+V+I+E=MOVIE,
or can I place any of the clips in any order and still get it to equal,
'MOVIE'. Each of the video files I am trying to combine, were not
professionally made, but they do fit together in an orderly fashion, to make
one singular, coherent and understandable movie. How can I get Movie Maker to
properly merge these files, or is this program not really designed to make a
singular movie from so many files?

I realize I could simply just create a playlist inside Windows Media Player,
but I just want to point and click on one singular movie file, and watch it,
instead of having to worry about having on hand, all 13 clips, and creating
and saving a media player playlist file to watch it all. Thats just too many
steps.

Thank you.
 
P

PapaJohn

Movie Maker doesn't work well with MPEG2 files.... see my website's Import
Movie Source Files > Video > MPEG page for info about doing conversions
before importing and using in a project.
 
J

John

thanks Papa. i will try to convert the singular files before i try to use
them in movie maker.
 

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