Create great home movies with Windows

You may think the software and skills needed to produce professional-looking movies are out of reach to all but the film industry elite. But the likelihood is that you already have an easy-to-use program installed on your computer that will help you edit and output your own home movies.

Windows Movie Maker has been included with home PCs since the year 2000 and can edit movies recorded on camcorders, cameras or even mobile phones and save them to a DVD. In this article we’ll show how to use it.

Camera, phone or camcorder
You don’t need a camcorder to make home movies these days. Most digital cameras have a movie mode of some kind and some mobile phones let you record short video clips.

To transfer footage, you may need to remove a memory card from the device and slot it into your PC or a memory card reader. Alternatively, the manufacturer may have supplied a cable to connect your phone or camera to the PC.

The process will usually work in a similar way to transferring photos, but refer to your manual for specific information. If you’re not using a camcorder, skip to the next section that begins with ‘The cutting room’ on the next page.

With video camcorders, it depends on the type of model you use as to how footage should be transferred. Some newer camcorders - especially high-definition ones - use hard disks or memory cards to store footage.

If this is the case with your model, it’s likely that a USB cable was provided in the box. Again, USB transfers can work differently, so have a look at the instruction manual for specifics.

The majority of home film buffs still use tape-based camcorders - miniDV remains the most popular tape format, although a high-definition version (HDV) that works with the same cassettes is also in use.