Windows Live Moviemaker crashes

I have to edit some video for a high school project due Tuesday. I took the video without talking and planned to add the sound later. The problem is, before I even finish editing 10% of the video, the preview section goes black and the progress bar freezes. Sometimes the sound keeps playing, and I have to go to the task manager and end the process to make it stop. The problems crop up even faster if I open the project again, as opposed to starting a new one.

I updated the program when this happened, but problems continue.

I have an NVIDIA 8800 GT and 4GB of RAM.

Can someone tell me how to fix this, or an alternate free video editor that I can dub over with the audio?

What file format is your original video??

Windows Media Player (.AVI) format. Taken with a very basic digital video camera little better than a cell phone.

Take a look at either of the following apps, easily found by Google. Both are free.

Avidemux

VirtualDub

Both can open and edit AVI files. I'm not positive they can overdub audio, but I would be quite surprised if they couldn't. Avidemux is probably easier for a first-timer to operate.

Windows Live Moviemaker has problems. You can use the old Moviemaker from Vista if you can find it. It works well on Windows 7 and is better than "Live Moviemaker".

Already tried Media player 2.6, and it didn't work. Avidemux 2.5 crashes when I try to save the project. I just tried VirtualDub and it won't open the file. It says the video format is H264 and it can't locate a decompressor for the format.

I'm starting to wonder if I should convert the video to another format prior to editing, that maybe it's format is what is messing up all these programs.

You could be right about conversion. I'd guess that would result in some quality loss, but you probably have only fair quality to start with. If you have a shaky format now, it may be difficult to find a program that can open the file well enough to convert it. I'm no video expert and can't help any further. That H 264 thing may be the key problem.

Actually, according to that mighty tome of information, Wikipedia, it's supposed to be a standard HD video format. Now I'm just worrying the files are corrupted.

Okay, I used Prism to convert the videos to WMV format, and they seem to work fine for now with windows live movie maker.