A couple years ago Matt, Adam, and I went on a KAP/4wd drive trip through the Mojave desert and Arizona. When we got back to California, it was Christmas, so they went back to Pennsylvania, Ling was in Singapore, and I was unemployed. Consequently I had a very quiet and secluded week utterly by myself.
One of the things I did that week was play with a Microsoft utility, Windows Movie Maker, and patched together some video fragments into a short movie about our desert KAP trips.
By my calculations, it took one hour of work for every minute of final footage produced. The process was arduous. I had an old, slow computer. Windows Movie Maker 1.0 was buggy and implemented poorly. One particularly annoying problem was the inability to mix multiple audio tracks.
Now fast forward three years. I've just returned from a two week KAP/4wd trip through Outback Australia. I came back with cool photos and some amusing video footage. One of the last times I updated Windows, it included a download of Windows Movie Maker version 2.0.
Well, I figured this time the software might be better. Plus, I have a much more powerful computer these days. So tonight I gave it a shot.
The first forty-five minutes were infuriating. Everytime I tried to type in a title, the system crashed. It was really gross. When I searched Google, I became severely disheartened. This does not appear to be a robust application. (it is 'free' from Microsoft -- it's even too shameful for them to charge you for it) Everyone has these crashing problems.
Fortunately I found an enthusiast with a page addressing WMM crashes. I started working through his list of corrections. Only after I disabled a particular codec, divax.af, did the program quit crashing. The other fixes, like turning down my hardware acceleration didn't help at all.
So after that frustration was over, I played with WMM. It seems otherwise stable and sufficiently simple. I once tried to use an Adobe video editing program and it was way, way too complicated for my needs. WMM 2.0 has a bit more functionality, makes it easier to do title sheets and captions, and also appears to support multiple audio tracks (though I haven't confirmed this).
Anyway, after an evening's work I managed to produce a three-minute long, 7MB, movie about KAP'g in Central Australia.