If you have been following my blog, you would have read a couple of articles that mentioned my wife using an iPhone 4 phone. Other than using a digital camera to take photos and videos of our baby, she would normally also use her iPhone to do that too. iPhone 4 is capable of snapping photos at 5 megapixels and also 1280 x 720 HDTV video or 720p for a shortname hand. She recently shot a very cute video of our baby which lasted for 50 seconds that she wanted to share it with her close friends in Facebook. I connected her iPhone 4 to my computer via USB cable and copied the video file in .mov format to my hard drive to upload it to Facebook.
To my surprise that such a short 50 seconds video takes up 62.6MB in size. Although my Internet download speed is 5Mbps, but my upload speed is only 512Kbps which would take approximately 20 minutes to complete uploading IF the line is not interrupted. Even if I am willing to spend the 20 minutes to upload the 62.6MB video to Facebook, I still need to rotate the video 90 degrees to the right so that her close friends can comfortable view the video without having to turn their head sideways…
Since I am going to edit the video anyway, I thought I might as well convert it to another format making the video size smaller. If you search on the Internet, there are many video editors available and some of it requires me to install Quicktime in order to rotate a .MOV video file. I’ve decided to give the free Windows Live Movie Maker by Microsoft a try since it supports a wide range of video formats such as “wmv, asf, wm, m2ts, m2t, mov, qt, avi, dvr-ms, wtv, mp4, m4v, 3gp, 3g2, k3g, mpeg, mpg, mpe, m1v, mp2, mpv2, mod and vob”
All I need to do is drag the .mov video file to the right hand box that says “click here to browse for videos and photos”. To rotate the video, I simply click on the “Rotate right” button that is on the ribbon menu. Now to save the mov video to a smaller sized file, I will need to click on the pull down menu to the left of the Home tab in the upper left corner, click Save Movie and select For Email. This option resizes the video’s width and height to a smaller window which also reduces the size of the file.
Windows Live Movie Maker took merely 21 seconds to save the movie and the final result file is only 9.38MB in size. It is THAT EASY and FAST! Now I only need 3 minutes to upload the video file instead of 20 minutes. For more information, you can also select “Create Custom Settings” from the Save Movie menu.
Windows Live Movie Maker doesn’t come pre-installed in Windows 7 and I have to use the Windows Live Essentials 2011 to download it. The Live Essentials installer allows you to install Mail, Windows Live Mesh, Bing Bar, Outlook Connector Pack, Writer, Family Safety, Messenger Companion, Messenger and Photo Gallery and Movie Maker. Make sure you select the “Choose the programs you want to install” when asked What do you want to install? or else your computer will end up having all of Windows Live Essentials programs.