Windows Movie Maker is a wonderful program for creating DVDs or YouTube-ready videos.  It meets all my criteria for a great program: it's easy to use, doesn't consume a lot of resources, it's stable and it's free. Movie Maker allows you to:

• trim the beginning or end of videos
• add sound tracks like music or narration
• add scene transitions like wipes
• insert titles, credits and captions
• add still photos or graphics
• create video effects (e.g., black & white, old time graininess)

Movie Maker has easy-to-use wizards to guide the novice through the movie-making steps but also has enough customization tools to make it a good tool for semi-pros.  


I was very dismayed to find that Microsoft removed Movie Maker in their release of Windows 7.  Microsoft offered a solution was to download Windows Live Essentials which includes Live Movie Maker.  But Live Movie Maker is a weak impostor of the Windows Movie Maker that came with Windows XP.

But I have found that you can download Movie Maker 2.6 for Vista and it will run perfectly fine on Windows 7. We recently hosted an Excel webinar and we took a minute and a half segment of the recorded webinar on how to add a Command Button to the Ribbon and added Title and End Credits using Windows Movie Maker.   Movie Maker divides your recordings into segments which is what appears in the graphic below from the Excel webinar. 


Go here to watch the segment and see how this basic format can give you something to easily add to your website. After editing the clip, we uploaded it to YouTube and Voila!