Using Windows MovieMaker to Prepare a Video File for Upload

If you have the capability to produce a digital recording and compress it into a format that will result in a file size of 20 megabytes or less, you can choose to submit the video of your sermon in a digital format. You can use Windows Media File, MPEG, Quicktime, or any other standard media file format that will reduce the file to 20 megabytes or less.

In order to reduce the file size, you will probably need to reduce the size of the picture to 320x240. If you need to make it smaller than that, please contact your instructor first.

DCC and Moodlesupport cannot provide technical support for this. Provided below, however, is a step-by-step procedure for using Microsoft Moviemaker (comes with Windows XP) to create a movie file for upload.

Moviemaker instructions:

These instructions assume that you have already imported the video into Moviemaker and built the project there. There are several ways to get video into your computer. Moviemaker can import directly from many digital video cameras over a cable. Your digital video camera may record to DVD in a format that Moviemaker can read. Your video card on your computer may allow you to plug an A/V cable into it and import analog video to your computer. Once you have the video in Moviemaker, you just drag-and-drop the file onto the timeline, do any editing you want to do, and you are ready to follow these instructions to save it.

  1. Open the Moviemaker project.
  2. Be certain the "Task" pane is open (on the left). If it isn't, go to the "View" menu and select "Task Pane."
  3. In the task pane, scroll down to step 3 and click on "Save to my computer."
  4. You will get a new dialog in which you assign a name to the file in step 1 and choose a location for the file to be saved in step 2. You may need to click "Browse" in step 2 to be sure the file is going where you intend it to go.
  5. Click "Next."
  6. In the next dialog box, click the radio button beside "Other settings."
  7. Click the dropdown arrow beside "other settings" and choose: "Video for Broadband (150 kbps)."
  8. Click "Next" again, and Moviemaker will save the file. You need to upload that file in week 4 in the designated area.

Unless your speech was excessively long, this should get the file size under 20 megabytes and you will be able to upload it.