In the beginning...

As I have said on countless other occasions, FlipShare has been a boon to home movie makers because it got them to start editing their videos, cutting a break to everyone asked to watch them.  At last, home movies were trimmed of at least some of the useless, pointless, and boring material that tried the patience of anyone asked to watch them.  Easily arranging clips, titles, and smooth transitions encouraged FlipShare users to focus on a subject and story - an advance of historic proportions.  (Okay... please forgive the hyperbole of someone who has so single-mindedly pursued these problems.)

A Painful Journey Forward

YouTube has encouraged many people to become even more creative, and to find better tools to enhance their creativity.  But the Flip culture is a thrifty culture, and for Flip users, free tools are infinitely better than something that costs money.  Windows Movie Maker and iMovie are either supplied with or available to users of all Flip-supported computers - i.e., Macs and PCs, so that is where the action is.

The problem is one of moving targets:

• Flips changed from VGA (640x480 pixels) to HD (1280x720 pixels) overnight.
• YouTube accommodated quickly by permitting (enforcing, actually) this new, widescreen format.
• Windows XP users became Windows Vista users, and are now moving on to Windows 7.
• FlipShare 4.5 could be coaxed into exporting HD files Windows Movie Maker could handle; FlipShare 5.0 took away that capability.
• Every version of Windows has had at least one new and different version of Windows Movie Maker, so solving the problems for one did not necessarily solve the problems for another.

Mac users have had a relatively easy time.  From the outset, the problems of editing Flip video with iMovie have been easier to solve than the problems of editing with Windows Movie Maker.  As a result, I have spent countless hours, and written many articles, trying to make Flip play nice with Windows Movie Maker.  Most recently, I have moved on to Windows 7, and to Windows Live Movie Maker, which is available to Vista users and pretty much forced onto Windows 7 users.

Are we there yet?

Windows Live Movie Maker appeared, at first, to have a huge advantage:  It claims to be able to edit .MP4 files, and Flip HD camcorders produce .MP4 files.  Great news, right? The problem is, .MP4 (like .AVI) is not a well-defined video file format.  Like .AVI, .MP4 is a container, and all kinds of unpredictable surprises can lurk inside containers.  Not all .MP4 files are alike. Different video editors and players are looking for different contents in .MP4 files.  A particular application's interpretation of what it expects to find is wrapped up in a special interpreter, called a codec. (The word derives from "compress-decompress," or "coder/decoder," depending on whom you talk to.)  Whether or not you can successfully edit an .MP4 file with Windows Live Movie Maker depends on what else you have been doing with your computer recently, and what codec is loaded to interpret .MP4 files.  A solution that works one day does not work the next day.

No, we're not there yet.  The fact that we are even talking about things like .MP4, containers, and codecs means that we are stumbling around in territory that 99% of Flip users are unfamiliar with.  They don't want to go there, and they shouldn't have to.

The Low Ramp Solution

The whole point of the Flip is its accessibility.  The ramp from never-shot-a-video-in-my-life to hey-this-is-easy-fun has never been shorter or shallower.  Flips are cheap, they have one big red button, and they shoot very nice video that's easy to share with friends and family. That's why 36% of all camcorders sold over the holiday season were Flips.  Now we need a low-ramp solution to moving forward to heightened creativity, and to even more fun - like scrolling titles and credits, better transitions, and creative effects that you're used to seeing on TV. This solution should also be low-cost and simple.  It should work every time, and it should keep working when you change from XP to Vista to Windows 7, and from one version of Movie Maker to another.

What all Windows editing applications have in common is that they love .WMV files.  If we can change .MP4 files (and even files from other camcorders) into .WMV files, simply and cheaply, and preserve the fidelity, we're in the sweet spot of easy editing. There is a free program available for all Windows users that does this.  It's called "Any Video Converter."  I have already written a couple of articles about this program, but I now propose it as a general solution - the Rosetta Stone for Windows Movie Maker of all flavors, on all Windows versions. I'm creating, and will soon post, a video about how to use this delightful little program that should have Flip users singing a new tune, and making new and better movies.

Here is the download link for Any Video Converter.