Windows 7: Splitting video in Windows Live Movie Maker

I'd like to take a hour long video and split it into 5 parts to upload to Youtube and Facebook. In WLMM I see how I can make the start and end points, fade in and out the sound etc and and then click "save trim" but if I save the movie it's still one large file which encodes or whatever all over again.



Can anyone help?

WL Movie Maker has only basic editing. It won't save a split movie as separate files. You need to delete the parts you don't want to save after splitting.

You can also revert to the Vista version "Windows Movie Maker" (not Windows Live Movie Maker). As I recall, all you need is access to a Vista disc and then copy the files over.

Using Windows Movie Maker, the process would be:

1: Open the full length video and begin playing it.

2: Locate the desired split point and split the file. The screen now shows 2 parts.

3: Drag the first part (up to the split point) to the "time line" area at the screen bottom.

4: "Publish" the portion you just dragged to the time line. That's now short movie number 1

5: Repeat the process for 2, 3, 4, etc. Make sure that the time line contains only the short clip when you "publish". If you instead split the long movie into 5 short clips and then drag all 5 to the time line, the published movie will be the same as the original long movie--the 5 short clips will be rejoined.

I'm surprised Windows Live Movie Maker can't do this, but that may be one of the reasons why the warning went out that it was inferior to the older "Windows Movie Maker" from Vista.

There is also a free version of Microsoft Expression Encoder which with a bit of playing around can do the same thing. You can download it from here Expression Encoder 4 Overview | Microsoft® Expression®

Thanks for all the help and suggestions. I guess newer isn't always better. Taking the splits and fades I made with WLMM, I'm in the process of working it out with VirtualDub Portable

No need to use Vdub on that but if you use it, the process is identical to the movie maker way of handling stuff like that:
Load a copy of your movie in the movie maker, delete everything (except for the first clip you want to keep and save that. Now do that again until you have your 5 (or so ) clips

While VD has the advantage that you don't have to re-encode the material (just set Video and Audio to Direct Stream Copy) and don't forget to cut on Keyframes only (use the yellow/golden keys to navigate to the final cut points
-DG

This is an excellent program (once you grasped the typical complex MS interface). But unfortunately the free version drops on you after 10 minutes - only $199 will cure that.

But that can be a pain because sometimes the key frames are far and apart.

As I recall, you can place a start point for a cut anywhere, but the ending point must be a key frame?

It is really weird. I have seen cases where there were 10 key frames in 5 seconds, and then as WHS says, you might have to wait a while for a stop point.

Question:

Is there a decent free basic editor that works on WMV and MPEG (non-AVI in general) that does NOT re-encode? I like that feature in Virtual Dub, but other than that I don't much like it.

I had been looking for a long time for such an editor - but in vain. For $19.95 I bought this one ( Easy Video Editor for FLV, WMV, MP4, AVI etc files ) which works very well and is easy to use. And it is really lossless. I think they have a 4 week trial, so you can check it out.

I thought the ten minute limit only applied to the screen capture app.