Making Multimedia Work

In the past decade we have seen wonderful progress in what normal people can do with multimedia. In the last couple of years, both Apple and Microsoft have reduced the cost and difficulty of creating video by bundling video editors with their standard consumer operating systems. Apple bundles iMovie and Microsoft bundles Windows Movie Maker. For the latter, see, http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/movie... The price of computers that are capable of editing meaningful amounts of video has decreased drastically, with far larger hard disk drives and far faster processors. Creating digital images has gotten similar boosts from digital still cameras that produce high-quality images and are sufficiently small to carry with us wherever we go and from cell phones (which we already carry everywhere) that contain cameras.

Despite this bounty of high quality, low cost multimedia enabling software and hardware, I was recently reminded of just how tough creating multimedia still can be. I decided to do a quick assembly of some video clips of a piano recital that I had taken with our digital still camera. Like most others, it takes low-resolution video, although its clips are limited to 30 seconds. While this sounds like a terrible inconvenience, the camera's light weight and small size more than make up for needing to assemble several clips to form a reasonable-length video. (Look carefully at any TV show or movie and note that most individual clips are shorter than 15 seconds!) Combining several short clips of a child playing in a piano concert was clearly a job for Windows Movie Maker. I fired up this extremely easy-to-use program, imported the clips, and dragged them to the timeline. The program crashed. I tried it again, and again the same thing happened. I tried a other clips of various formats and, with the exception of Microsoft's preferred WMV format, every clip crashed the program. Of course, it had never done this before.

I went to my favorite search engine, Google, and entered the relevant keywords, Movie Maker, crash, etc. For once, I was not instantly successful in finding something useful. I went to the Microsoft Movie Maker site and scrolled through some related user groups. Many referred me to PapaJohn, http://www.eicsoftware.com/pictures/Papa... Based on information there, I concluded that he was probably right in strongly hinting that I might have codec conflict. Divx, the modified MPEG 4 codec, was often a suspect, but so was WinDVD. To see what codecs were on my system, PapaJohn recommended using GSpot, a utility you can find with Google and then download. While this was both entertaining and educational to see, it did not immediately solve my problem. However, with the codec conflict hint, and with WinDVD identified as a potential problem, I re-attempted to drag video clips to the timeline. This time, I paid closer attention to the error message. It actually identified an offending module. I looked in our WinDVD folder and sure enough, this module appeared twice. I renamed both of its occurrences and Movie Maker suddenly started to cooperate again. Sometime later, I found that this fix disabled my ability to play DVDs. The workaround is to re-re-name the module when I want to play DVDs.

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