Microsoft Windows Movie Maker 2

Video making doesn't come easier or cheaper than this. Microsoft Windows Movie Maker 2 is a free download from www.microsoft.com/windowsxp /moviemaker/default.asp.

Version 1 of Windows Movie Maker was a basic editor that did little more than arrange clips on the timeline, trim them, record a soundtrack and save the result. Version 2 provides a better designed interface, effects and transitions, more control over audio and a title editor. It's worth splashing out on Microsoft's Plus Pack, at £15.99 inc VAT, which includes more than 50 additional effects and transitions.

If you're looking for an application that will do it all, Movie Maker 2's Automovie wizard could be just the thing. It will arrange your clips on the timeline, add transitions and a title and edit the entire thing to one of several predefined styles, including 'music video', 'old movie' and 'sports highlights'.

It's also possible to be more involved in the editing process. The Movie Maker interface is clean, uncluttered and well organised into panes. On the left of the screen a tasks pane provides easy access to the program features, including capture and import, effects, transitions, titles and output. The same pane is used to organise and view collections - video clips, stills, audio and effects - which are displayed alongside in the content pane. On the right is the resizable monitor with VCR controls and a button for splitting clips.

At the bottom of the screen the storyboard window can be toggled into timeline mode and has extra buttons for project play and rewind, zooming, recording voice narration and setting audio levels.

Microsoft has avoided the use of jargon and technical speak and there's plenty of help for novices. For example, the capture options include 'Best quality for playback on my computer' with the explanation 'use if you plan to store and edit video on your computer'. For the more technically aware, the settings detail pane gives the file format, resolution, bit rate and other information.

The storyboard provides large cells which display a thumbnail view of clips that are dropped onto them from the content pane. Transitions are dropped onto cells in between the clips, and effects can be dropped onto clips on the storyboard.

When a transition is selected you get a big preview in the monitor, but options for customising transitions are limited to altering their duration, to do this you must use the timeline view. Both video clips appear in the same track with an overlap and the transition appears in its own track below. To lengthen a transition you need to grab one end and drag it along the timeline until it's the required length. Movie Maker automatically increases the overlap of the two clips to which it applies and adjusts everything further along the timeline.

It's not just transitions that are limited to a single preset style, effects are also one-shot, fixed features. This makes them easy to apply - you can drop up to five onto a single clip - although some control over such things as slow motion, fades, brightness, blur and colour adjustments, would be useful.

Titles and credits are added via a wizard, which again is quite restrictive, but provides all the basic options. You can add titles at the beginning or end of the project, or prior to a selected clip, so captions and subtitles are an option. You can edit the title text and amend the font and colour, but drop shadows and other styling options, such as those on offer in Videostudio and Studio 8, are absent. There are a variety of animation styles to choose from, including rolling and crawling credits, banners with picture-in-picture insets and transparent overlay.

Movie Maker has no DVD authoring or burning capability, but you can record a wmv movie to CD using the proprietary Highmat format.

Windows Movie Maker 2 is one of the easiest to use and the least expensive video application reviewed here. If your editing ambitions stop at capturing and assembling a few clips with basic transitions and the occasional off-the-peg effect, you'll love it.

Contact: Microsoft 0870 601 0100
www.microsoft.com

System requirements:

• 800MHz CPU
• 256MB of Ram
• Windows XP
• 2GB of hard disk space