Windows Movie Maker was first introduced as part of a service pack for Windows XP, and quickly proved to be very popular. It made creating videos very easy, so much so that many people didn’t even need to read the directions. (Like me—I created a couple of silly parody videos with the Windows XP version.) Windows Movie Maker was also included in Windows Vista, but with the advent of Windows 7, Microsoft removed it and made it part of the Windows Live Essentials package. To me, the latest version seemed just as easy to use, while I was creating my third silly video without reading the directions. Was I missing out on something by doing it that way? I was very interested to see what Getting StartED with Windows Live Movie Maker could tell me. (Yes, they capitalize ED in the title, because it is a "friends of ED" book.)

Windows Live Movie Maker 2011 makes it easy to create photo slideshows and home movies in seconds. Your SkyDrive makes it easy to publish and share your movies. Friends, family and anyone else who has permission to view your SkyDrive will be able to view, play and share your Windows Live Movie Maker 2011 movies directly from their web browsers. In this tutorial, I’ll show how to upload a Windows Live Movie Maker 2011 video and share it with your contacts.

After completing our previous tutorials on Windows Live Movie Maker 2011, your video project should be all set and ready to be shared. However, prior to exporting your Windows Live Movie Maker 2011 project, it’ll be saved as a Movie Maker Project file with the extension .wlmp. These .wlmp can only be opened on your computer in Windows Live Movie Maker. In order to share your video with friends and family or upload it to YouTube, Facebook or another website, you’ll have to export it as a .wmv file. In this tutorial, we’ll show how to save your movie in a shareable format using the recommended settings. For advanced users, we’ll also go through the steps for creating your own custom video settings.

Ever notice those annoying black bars on the sides or along the top and bottom of a video? Oftentimes, the culprit is an incorrectly set aspect ratio. In Windows Live Movie Maker 2011, it’s easy to mistakenly save a movie in the wrong aspect ratio, thus creating these black bars in your final product. This tutorial will explain why these black bars appear and how you can get rid of them.

A picture’s worth a thousand words--but sometimes, your home movie or photo slideshows can benefit from just a bit more. That’s where titles, captions and credits come in. Windows Live Movie Maker 2011 allows you to add these textual elements in a snap. You can even give them a professional look and feel by tweaking the font and style and adding cinematic effects. In this tutorial, we’ll teach you the differences between titles, captions and credits and when to use each of these.

Windows Live Movie Maker 2011 lets you easily create photo slideshows and home movies without any technical knowledge. You can give them a more professional look and feel by adding transitions, pan and zoom and other visual effects. In this tutorial, we will explain the differences between each of these animations and effects and show you how to use them in your Windows Live Movie Maker 2011 project.

Sometimes, when you import videos into your Windows library, they end up being oriented incorrectly. This is particularly an issue with cell phone videos, which can be shot in landscape or portrait mode. You can correct their orientation permanently by using Windows Live Movie Maker 2011, which you can get for free as part of Windows Live Essentials 2011 from Microsoft. This quick tutorial will show how to import such videos into Windows Live Movie Maker 2011, rotate and then export them as new video with the correct orientation.

Windows Live Movie Maker 2011 is all about ease of use, and when it comes to adding background music to your videos and photo slideshows, that theme remains the same. Windows Live Movie Maker’s audio editing features are very basic and mostly limited to fading in and fading out, changing the start and end points and adjusting the volume for the entire clip. But if all you want is a little mood music for your home movie, then Windows Live Movie Maker 2011 let’s you add a soundtrack from your music collection in seconds. In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to add music to your Windows Live Movie Maker 2011 and edit your audio clips.

In our previous tutorials, we introduced you to Windows Live Movie Maker 2011 and showed how to import photos and videos into Windows Live Movie Maker 2011. The next step is to begin editing your video clips in Windows Live Movie Maker 2011. Windows Live Movie Maker’s video editing tab lets you split and trim video clips and adjust their speeds. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to use all of these tools and functions.

Creating movies from pictures and videos is a breeze with Windows Live Movie Maker 2011. Once you have your pictures and video clips imported into Windows Move Live Movie Maker 2011, you can get right down to applying AutoMovie Themes, creating title clips and credits, setting your project to music and adding animations and transitions. But before you can begin, you’ll have to import your multimedia. In this first part of our series on Windows Live Movie Maker 2011, we’ll show you just how to do that.