Camera phone QuickTime movie mixes

More and more people are getting camera phones that can capture video clips as well as still pictures. You may know teachers, students, or personally want to edit camera phone video clips and make a remix or montage of this videos for subsequent sharing. If you are a Windows user and are wanting to use the free program MovieMaker2 from Microsoft to create your video masterpiece, you may run into trouble if your camera phone records directly to QuickTime.

Fear not, however, for a free software solution can fix this problem. MovieMaker does not support direct importing of QuickTime movie files, but the free program Front End Convert Drop can convert the QuickTime files into Windows AVI files that MovieMaker recognizes. The converted files can be immediately imported into MovieMaker and then manipulated / edited like other imported video content. QuickTime Pro is an inexpensive ($30) software program that can also do lots of file format converting (for both audio and video files) and is cross-platform (Windows/Macintosh compatible.)

I created a short how-to guide about Windows MovieMaker last Spring which reviews the basics of importing video, editing it, and exporting/sharing an edited video. If you just want to create a movie with still images on a Windows OS computer, I recommend using PhotoStory3 instead of MovieMaker, it is easier and fairly flexible. (Unfortunately it exports in a Windows Media format not compatible with other computer platforms, but that is my only major gripe.) David Jakes has an excellent tutorial about PhotoStory3 available in PDF format. Both PhotoStory3 and MovieMaker2 require WindowsXP. Scott Firenza also has good PDF handouts for teachers about using MovieMaker and PhotoStory.

Although I have used both these tools a fair amount and taught others how to use them, my favorite multimedia authoring tools remain iMovie, iPhoto and iDVD included with the iLife software suite.

If you want to share your edited (or unedited) video clips online with others– and you have permission and copyright clearance to do so (of course) you might check out Vimeo or YouTube. Both are free web services. As you might expect, some of the content shared on these sites will be considered “offensive”– I am not condoning the content by linking these sites here, just noting that these services are available and you may find them of use. You can bet lots of young people know about these sites and are using them. I heard on TwiT a couple of weeks ago that YouTube is spending something like a million dollars per month on bandwidth– their business model may not support continuation indefinitely into the future if they aren’t bought by someone big– like Yahoo’s acquisition of Flickr. You can bet these types of web 2.0 video sharing sites are going to continue in the months and years ahead, however, even if the names and web addresses change.

I have more links related to digital storytelling on http://del.icio.us/wfryer/DigitalStorytelling, and I update that list fairly often.