Should saving take this long

[Guest]

OK I've never used movie maker before today, but my boss asked me to edit a
wmv file we had and movie maker was my only option. Here's what I do:
Import the wmv file into movie maker. For some reason when I import the 79MB
file it becomes a 394MB file. After editing the part out that I don't want, I
try to save it as a 50MB file since i don't need anything that's super high
quality. It will start to save, saying it's going to take 20 minutes, and
then once it hits 2-3% the save time will start rising. Today I let it get to
1000 minutes and it was still going up.

What is the problem here? Why does it seeminly stall out so soon and how can
I save my new file?

Thanks in advance for any help you can give me!

 

[PapaJohn \(MVP\)]

see my Problem Solving > Can't Save a Movie page

 

[Guest]

Thanks, I read it and tried a few different things, but nothing seems to be
working. I tried splitting it down into 1 minute(so about 1.5mb) clips and I
could save one, but after that first one it did the stall thing again on the
others just at a later point(around 81%). I tried saving it to a different
spot, and that didn't seem to matter either.

Could it possibly be a problem with movie maker importing the file as higher
quality than it actually is? It seems weird to me that when I go to save the
file, that I imported as 72mb, it says it needs around 300MB to save it.

 

[PapaJohn \(MVP\)]

I don't want to guess, not without knowing the kind of source file you're
using and the compression codec used to make it.

Movie Maker doesn't copy the source file... it uses it as is and links to
it.... the change is file size depends on your selection of quality when you
save it.... small files can end up much larger and big files get smaller...
it can go either way.

 

[Guest]

hmm...thanks. It's just a basic wmv file as far as i know, but I don't know
what compression codec was used to make it. I think my boss is going to call
go to meeting(who made the original file for us) and see if they can just cut
it down for us.

Thanks for your quick responses and help!