The new version of Movie Maker (which many of our students will have at home) has done away with the Save Movie File option. Furthermore, files that are saved as projects are unfortunately not reverse compatible – they won’t work on our machines. This makes it more difficult for the kids bring a project they are working on at home and continue to work on it at school and it presents difficulties in showing the movie here at school.

Working on the film

The easiest way to manage this is to work on it either at home or at school – but not both. It might be possible to open and edit a project that has been created using our old version on their newer version at home but it certainly isn’t possible to do it the other way around.

Projects contain all the raw footage that go into making a film. If your students are at the end of the process and no longer need all of this footage (they just need to do some fine tuning, add titles, etc.), they can ‘publish’ the video as a WMV using the new version (below) and then import that file into the older version that we have.

Showing the movie (Publishing)

Movie Maker have updated their terminology so that now, in order to turn your film into a WMV (the format that will play on our PCs), you need to ‘publish’ the film. To do so, follow these steps:

1. Select File> Publish Movie.

2. Select This Computer from the list.

3. Click Next.

4. Name your movie and specify where you want it to go.

This will make a WMV version on your PC that can then be put onto a memory stick or burnt to a CD and submitted.