Video editing on Vista

[Keith Wilson]

My computer is about a year old and came with Vista (never again!) and all of the tagalongs.

One of these was Windows Movie Maker. I have tried to edit some of my video's with it, but when I import a clip either from my camera or from my computer the only thing I get is the audio and progress/time bar along with a black screen. Everything is there except the video.
After a little research I am led to believe that they found that WMM is incompatible with Vista.
Can anybody comfirm this, or maybe steer me in the right direction to a solution?

Thanks in advance!

 

[Walt VanRheen]

CODEC. A codec is a device or computer program capable of encoding and/or decoding a digital data stream or signal. If you dont have the right Codec, you will not see any video but can still have the sound.

 

[John Wetter]

Yep, 99.9% chance of it being a codec issue. Guessing it's a camera that is either flash or HDD based, and it likely uses H.264 with a proprietary wrapper which will require installing the manufacturers codec to do anything with it. You'll have this problem no matter what editor you try to use. If you're looking to do a quick and dirty movie, WMM should be fine. As far as Vista, just be done with it and upgrade to Windows 7.

 

[Keith Wilson]

Nobody warned me about Vista until I had it, but it has to be one of the most epic of all failures. I know people that have never had a problem with it (that they'll admit), but I'm not that lucky.
Thanks for the pointers, and I have been seriously considering Window 7. How major of a task is the upgrade?

 

[John Erwin]

Thanks for the pointers, and I have been seriously considering Window 7. How major of a task is the upgrade?

I replaced Vista with Windows 7 on a laptop and was very happy with the results. I do not recommend using the UPGRADE path though; you'll likely end up with just as many problems you had with Vista. Best to do a clean install. The installation process is straightforward and easy to follow.

Before doing this go to the support site for your laptop and download all the Windows 7 drivers that you'll need. Of course you'll also want to back up any data/documents etc. from your machine before doing this.

 

[James Langford]

After a little research I am led to believe that they found that WMM is incompatible with Vista.
Can anybody comfirm this, or maybe steer me in the right direction to a solution?

As others have said, it is most likely a codec problem. What kind of camera do you have? You could try downloading and installing the DIVX codec pack. I have found that resolves a lot of issues related to codecs.

As for WMM, it actually works much better on Vista than on Windows 7, IMO. With 7, WMM has been moved into the Windows Live suite of tools, and I find it much less user friendly and with less options than it used to have. Don't get me wrong, Windows 7 is a much better version of the OS than Vista, but movie maker actually took a step back IMO.

James

 

[Brandon Sullivan]

I always had problems with WMM.. Especially for shooting HD Video.. Thus I just had to foot the bill for Adobe Premiere.. I also had to go download the free codecs for my video format, so that I could watch the raw files, before rendering them into .mpeg

 

[Keith Wilson]

The camera is a Samsung S1050. Not a great camera by any stretch of the imagination, but not bad for the price either. I never planned on having it this long, but a new camera has a hard time climbing the priority list around here.
WMM will import and show pictures taken with this camera all day long, just not the videos.