[caryjames]

Hi Guys- I am hoping that one of you folks can shed some light and maybe suggest an alternative movie editing program.

The situation is this... my partner has created a small educational film for work (put in at least 16-17hours of work), everything in the editing stages went as it is supposed to until the time came to 'Publish" the file. Windows treats the 'unpublished' file in some kind of specialized file format (MSWMM) that can only be played in Movie Maker- this file then gets converted to .wmv (or avi I forget) once the file is 'Published'.

When the file gets 'Published' frames and segments are missing.... so I wondered if another movie editing program could open up the raw movie maker files (MSWMM) and then save as avi, wmv etc.

I did a search and found some file converters that claimed they were able to do the conversion but none seemed to be able to open the MSWMM file type.

The geniuses at Microsoft have not made Movie Maker backwards compatible so files created on the Vista version can't be opened with the XP version.

We did trouble shoot the issue online but none of the suggestions involving tweaks to Movie Maker did the trick.

Any thoughts... or is it just easier to start over in another image editing program?

Thanks in advance as usual!!
Cary

[RobMitchell]

MSWMM, as you've probably worked out, stands for Microsoft Windows Movie Maker so sadly it's the native format for that program only. I'm quite sure nothing else will be able to open it... Although we only rarely use Movie Maker in my job, we've not experienced missing frames before (we have the XP version though). It might sound like a stupid question, but when you go to export the movie to an .avi or .wmv, have you tried all the different export options? My thought is that if the file has been published to a lowish quality, for smaller file sizes etc, it may have changed the frame rate or even dropped frames. Try setting it to the highest it can be and see if that helps at all.

It'd be a shame to start again but, from what I know, there's not a lot else you can do with that MSWMM file. If you're out of options and have to look into other software, movie editing programs can get very expensive and a lot of the time contain too many features that you actually end up needing. A perfect example of this is Adobe Premier Pro. Amazing program that will do what you want, but incredibly deep and expensive.

I've not tried the following program, but it's rated highly and free. Could be worth checking out:
WAX

[caryjames]

Thanks Rob- I think that after doing a bunch of reading myself on the net that the best/easiest solution would be to start over with another application. She did try saving it to different formats and qualities but none mattered. From my brief investigation it does not seem that Movie Maker is very predictable, it is a very easy app to learn but the results are sometimes a bit wonky.

I appreciate the insight and the link!!!
Cary