| User review:
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Windows Media Maker 2 is actually a reasonably good product and fantastic for those "Mums and Dads" who want to get "creative" with their new miniDV camera, but can't afford a proper NLE program like Premiere.
It is very easy to use for the beginner and the price cannot be beaten.
However, this is where it stops. WMM2 is very much limited in what in can do, and although this may be fine for the casual user, it is completely insufficient for any real degree of video editing.
Furthermore, Microsoft has put this program into a number of irritating shackles, obviously designed to lock the unsuspecting user into Microsoft products. Firstly, this program cannot export to anything but WMV (Windows Media Video) and DV-AVI Type I. This is completely unsatisfactory. If one wants to encode the video for DVD production, you will have to go into the convoluted step of encoding first to DV-AVI and then an external encoder. This is similarly so if you want to produce DivX video. Although WMV gives reasonably good quality for size, it is not a well supported standard over different platforms and this obvious product limitation, for the want of a better word, [i]evil[/i]. ;-)
Also, DV-AVI Type I means that the DV file will not be able to be loaded with a VFW based program (which includes many freeware editors). To get around this, I suggest you have a look at my guide on converting Type I to Type II here: http://users.tpg.com.au/mtam
For the target audience, WMM2 is a reasonable program and a good introduction into video editing. However, if Microsoft removed some of the unnecessary shackles (e.g., allowed third party AVI codecs to be used, include MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 encoding, DV-AVI Type 2 output), it would be a much superior program. |
