Movie Maker allows you to save your movie in a variety of formats. One format you should save in is the AVI format for two reasons: It has the highest, lossless quality and it converts well to other formats later should you need to.



NOTES
What does AVI stand for? It stands for Audio-Video-Interleaved. AVI is the most common video file format. Because of the high quality of video information contained in the AVI format, AVI files are large. Stored in AVI format:

5 minutes of video = 1 Gig

Doesn’t bother me, disk space is so cheap now. Have you heard of the new 50-Gig Blu-Ray discs? It looks just like a DVD, but it stores 50 gig of data instead of 4 gig. I mention that because when Blu-Ray discs become commonplace, you’ll be able to store hours of solid high quality AVI video files on a single Blu-Ray disc.

I strongly recommend that you save your home movie in an AVI format on your hard drive. When you need to convert to other formats later, you’ll be starting off with a high quality file.
This is the Windows folder organization system I use:

• I create subfolders under the My Videos folder:
• My Videos/Working folder - stores raw video footage that I capture from my camcorder, Movie Maker projects, and pictures and sound files used in my project.
• My Videos/Finished folder - stores my finished movie AVI file and WMV (Windows Media Video) format files.
• My Videos/iPod folder - when I convert my movie to the MPEG4 format (needed by iPod), I store the iPod MPEG4 videos here.

It’s simple and it works for me. Find something that will work for your. The important thing is to have a system or you won’t be able to find your stuff.

Homework

1. Come up with a folder system to store your source files, working files, finished movies, and your iPod Video files if you plan to upload to iPod.
2. When you have finished editing your movie in Movie Maker, save your movie with the DV-AVI setting.
3. Go to the folder where you saved the AVI file in and see if the formula: 5 minutes = 1 Gig of space holds true.
4. Double-click on the AVI file to play the movie.