Vista - on the positive side #2
-
I took some pictures on xmas morning at my mom's apt, and whist resizing them to be easier for her to download over dialup, I thought "hey, why don't I try out the new highly-touted media-creation features in Vista". So I started with the original JPGs, and the process went like this: 1. Ran Movie Maker 2. Clicked "import pictures" and selected all the JPG files. They imported fine 3. Selected all the JPGs and dragged them into the storyboard area at the bottom. They all showed up there, in the right order! 4. Hovered the mouse over some of the things down in the storyboard, since I didn't know what they were for. The tooltips were well-written and I groked everything right away. 5. Fiddled around with some transition effects, the preview mode helped a lot here (it demos what an effect will do) 6. Told Movie Maker that I wanted to burn to a DVD, MM prompted me to save a project and then passed that on over to DVD Maker. 7. DVD Maker came up with everything pre-set to reasonable values. I fiddled with the available DVD menus, and settled on one that I liked. 8. Clicked Burn and watched the progress bar. While it looks like a lot in words, keep in mind that I had no idea what I was doing when I started. I had used Movie Maker to actually make a movie exactly twice before, and that was months ago on XP and I don't remember now what I did back then. As is often the case, the little things are what make the whole process smooth. Select-all worked right. Dragging multiple files into the storyboard worked right. Movie Maker had a persistent list of commonly-used commands on the left side. The defaults in DVD Maker were sensible, and it was easy to change things the couple of times that I didn't like the default. Previews of effects and DVD menus let me see exactly what would be on the final DVD. I gotta give a big Stephen Colbert Tip of the Hat to the team that worked on these apps. Just two criticisms: The part where MM hands off to DVDM was rough - I had to go through the intermediate step of saving a project file which takes me out of the whole "I'm making a movie!" zone. The live previews were unreasonably slow at first, until I realized it was because my laptop was in Power Saver mode, which for me limits the CPU speed to about 800MHz. Once I changed to High Perf, the previews were snappy. DVD Maker could have easily checked the power profile[^] and alerted me that I could switch po
-
I took some pictures on xmas morning at my mom's apt, and whist resizing them to be easier for her to download over dialup, I thought "hey, why don't I try out the new highly-touted media-creation features in Vista". So I started with the original JPGs, and the process went like this: 1. Ran Movie Maker 2. Clicked "import pictures" and selected all the JPG files. They imported fine 3. Selected all the JPGs and dragged them into the storyboard area at the bottom. They all showed up there, in the right order! 4. Hovered the mouse over some of the things down in the storyboard, since I didn't know what they were for. The tooltips were well-written and I groked everything right away. 5. Fiddled around with some transition effects, the preview mode helped a lot here (it demos what an effect will do) 6. Told Movie Maker that I wanted to burn to a DVD, MM prompted me to save a project and then passed that on over to DVD Maker. 7. DVD Maker came up with everything pre-set to reasonable values. I fiddled with the available DVD menus, and settled on one that I liked. 8. Clicked Burn and watched the progress bar. While it looks like a lot in words, keep in mind that I had no idea what I was doing when I started. I had used Movie Maker to actually make a movie exactly twice before, and that was months ago on XP and I don't remember now what I did back then. As is often the case, the little things are what make the whole process smooth. Select-all worked right. Dragging multiple files into the storyboard worked right. Movie Maker had a persistent list of commonly-used commands on the left side. The defaults in DVD Maker were sensible, and it was easy to change things the couple of times that I didn't like the default. Previews of effects and DVD menus let me see exactly what would be on the final DVD. I gotta give a big Stephen Colbert Tip of the Hat to the team that worked on these apps. Just two criticisms: The part where MM hands off to DVDM was rough - I had to go through the intermediate step of saving a project file which takes me out of the whole "I'm making a movie!" zone. The live previews were unreasonably slow at first, until I realized it was because my laptop was in Power Saver mode, which for me limits the CPU speed to about 800MHz. Once I changed to High Perf, the previews were snappy. DVD Maker could have easily checked the power profile[^] and alerted me that I could switch po
So what does Vista have to do with Movie Maker? Vista is an OS, and Movie Maker is an app that should be able to run on things besides Vista. If it doesn't, well, that's not a good thing about Vista, it's a bad thing about Movie Maker. Marc
People are just notoriously impossible. --DavidCrow
There's NO excuse for not commenting your code. -- John Simmons / outlaw programmer
People who say that they will refactor their code later to make it "good" don't understand refactoring, nor the art and craft of programming. -- Josh Smith -
So what does Vista have to do with Movie Maker? Vista is an OS, and Movie Maker is an app that should be able to run on things besides Vista. If it doesn't, well, that's not a good thing about Vista, it's a bad thing about Movie Maker. Marc
People are just notoriously impossible. --DavidCrow
There's NO excuse for not commenting your code. -- John Simmons / outlaw programmer
People who say that they will refactor their code later to make it "good" don't understand refactoring, nor the art and craft of programming. -- Josh SmithMovie Maker (and DVD Maker) is one of the apps bundled with Vista - so at present, it is synonymous with Vista.
-
Movie Maker (and DVD Maker) is one of the apps bundled with Vista - so at present, it is synonymous with Vista.
MovieMaker is also a free download for XP Steve
-
Movie Maker (and DVD Maker) is one of the apps bundled with Vista - so at present, it is synonymous with Vista.
And now apparently the word synonymous is synonymous with the word associated.
if(!curlies){ return; }