I've been experimenting with Windows Movie Maker recently. It's not a bad piece of software for something that's absolutely free if you are running a recent version of Windows. However it has a couple of major flaws that you need to be aware of concerning memory requirements and file paths.
First the memory problem. MovieMaker runs quite happily on a 32 bit system with 2GB of memory, until that is you get to the point of trying to publish a video in high definition. It simply runs out of memory. Increasing virtual memory seemed like it should solve the problem, but no, it had no effect. There seemed to be no other option for an immediate solution than moving the project to another machine with more memory. However that revealed another truth about Movie Maker. Its project file stores links to the various clips using absolute not relative paths.
Experimentation revealed that the paths weren't even stored relative to user home so for a truly portable project that would work on any PC, at least one that had a C drive, the only solution seemed to be to store the project in a folder with a fixed location that could easily be copied to another C drive on a different computer - unless anyone knows better!
Having finally fixed the problem, at least for a small test project, I could at last publish the video using the more capable computer. The spec was very similar apart from the fact that it has 4GB of memory. It's still running Win 7 32 bit so I'm reluctant to believe that the problem is anything other than that.
Problems solved or circumvented? Definitely circumvented. Let's hope Microsoft fix them in some future update and for now at least, advertise the fact that more than 2GB is required to run.
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