Saving movies in other formats

[Andrea]

Hi,

When you finish making a movie it automatically saves as
a .wmv file. Is there anyway to change this setting so
you have the option of choosing the type of file it is
saved as (ie I want to be able to save it as an M-PEG or
something like that)

Please email me ...
Thanks in advance
Andrea

 

[Bob]

You can't save a movie as MPEG in Movie Maker. You can only save it as WMV
(with many compression options) or as DV-AVI (uncompressed).

When you get to the "Movie Setting" screen after clicking on "Save to my
computer", click on "Show more choices...", then click on "Other settings:",
then select the desired format from the pull-down menu.

-Bob

 

[Eddy]

Bob,

You seem to know the procedure; please allow me to direct
this to you. I want to make a DVD. In the Video
setting panel of the wizard, if I click on Digital Device
Format (DV-AVI), the recording and playback are very
jerky (both image and sound). This doesn't happen for
the WMV. With a Pentium 4 2.26Ghz and 736Mb RAM, I am
told the issue is possibly a conflict. How can I find
it, please ?

Eddy

P.S. didn't see the movie setting screen, you speak of.

 

[Bob]

Eddy,

You definitely have plenty of CPU and RAM to play a DV-AVI movie. However,
a slow and/or fragmented hard drive can cause jerky playback. DV-AVI is
uncompressed, and is stored at ~30 Mbps. The same size,
high-quality-compressed WMV file is stored at less than 2 Mbps.

So it is "possible" that your hard drive is not keeping up with the data
rate required to play the DV-AVI file. Check your hard drive to see if it
needs to be defragmented. And specifically look at the fragmentation report
to see if your jerky DV-AVI file is fragmented.

I looked to see which video decoder was being used when I play a MM2-saved
DV-AVI file on my PC (using Windows Media Player 9). It is using the
Microsoft "DV Video Decoder", version 6.05.01.0900, located in
C:\WINDOWS\system32\qdv.dll.

While playing the video in WMP9, go to File -> Properties. It should list
the video codec as DV Video Decoder. You can find the version by
right-clicking on the file qv.dll and selecting Properties -> Version ->
File Version

To get to the "Movie Setting" screen in MM2:
File -> Save Movie File... -> My computer. Then click the Next button
twice.

-Bob

P.S. I am running on an XP Pro (Media Center Edition) PC with a 2.54GHz P4,
512MB RAM, and an external hard drive (250GB, 7200 RPM, USB 2.0).

 

[The March Hare \(MVP\)]

You definitely have plenty of CPU and RAM to play a DV-AVI movie. However,
a slow and/or fragmented hard drive can cause jerky playback. DV-AVI is
uncompressed, and is stored at ~30 Mbps. The same size,
high-quality-compressed WMV file is stored at less than 2 Mbps.

DV video is compressed using dvsd which uses a constant bit rate.

NTSC DV video is approximately 3.5 MB/s

Uncompressed 16-bit 30 fps 720x480 video is approximately 20.7 MB/s

 

[Bob]

Of course you're right. Thanks for the correction. I shouldn't have said
that DV-AVI was uncompressed. But I did get the bit-rate right.

Anyway, my main point is that playing DV-AVI is much more demanding on a
hard drive than playing WMV. So it is possible that the hard drive
performance could be causing the playback problems described by the original
poster in this thread.

-Bob