Windows Movie Maker is no longer available, and Microsoft officially discontinued the software on January 10, 2017. So, this post introduces the best free Movie Maker alternative – MiniTool MovieMaker to help you edit and create videos with ease on Windows.
You must have heard about the free video editing software Windows Movie Maker. As one of the world’s most popular free video editors, Movie Maker can help you easily and quickly create a movie with your videos and photos. Unfortunately, this tool has been laid to rest. Don’t worry! There are some Movie Maker alternatives available that are more powerful and easier to use.
About Windows Movie Maker
Windows Movie Maker, part of Windows Essentials 2012, is a video editing application by Microsoft and offers the ability to create and edit videos as well as to publish them on OneDrive, Facebook, Vimeo, YouTube, and Flickr.
Main Interface
After downloading the free video editing software, you can install it on your computer and then launch it to get its main interface as follows.
From the above interface, you can see that there are 4 main parts of this software: Menu bar, Ribbon or Tool bar, Preview window, and Storyboard pane. With a clear interface, you can easily create a movie with this software.
Simple Steps to Create a Video
First, import your media files to Windows Movie Maker.
Second, you can edit your movie. Windows Movie Maker offers the following special effects to help you enhance and complete your movie.
- Transition: Movie Maker offers 78 transitions to help you make the switch smooth and look good.
- Pan and zoom: The free video editing software lets you apply the Pan and Zoom effect to the video or image and make it slowly zoom in on the subjects of interest and pan from one subject to another.
- Visual Effects: This Microsoft tool offers a variety of filters and editing effects to change the appearance of your video clips.
Finally, export your movie.
Why We Need a Movie Maker Alternative
Movie Maker was indeed once the world’s most popular free video editor, but it has been laid to rest after many years of distinguished service. Although we can still get this tool from some websites, the software won’t receive any security updates to fix newly discovered vulnerabilities.
Users will always encounter a variety of problems when editing a movie with Windows Movie Maker, such as black bars. There are some common Movie Maker problems.
Windows Movie Maker Not Working
According to a survey, we find that many users have encountered the Movie Maker not working issue. If they launch the free video editing software, they will encounter the following messages:
- Windows Movie Maker has stopped working.
- Movie Maker can’t start.
You can find answers from this post: Solved – Windows Movie Maker Not Working (Windows 10/8/7) to solve the problem.
Windows Movie Maker No Sound
Sometimes, you can easily fix this issue by converting the video file format. Besides, you can find more solutions from this post: 8 Solutions: Windows Movie Maker No Sound.) However, we find that this solution didn’t work in many cases. Therefore, many users finally solved the no sound issue by using a Movie Maker alternative.
Windows Movie Maker Black Bars
This issue happens when your media files do not match your project’s aspect ratio. To fix it, change your project aspect ratio to match your source files, or crop photos and videos beforehand.
Windows Movie Maker Crashes
Movie Maker crashes are inevitable and incredibly frustrating. Since it no longer receives security updates, finding a reliable alternative is essential.
Best Windows Movie Maker Alternative: MiniTool MovieMaker
There are a lot of video editing software programs on the market. Here, MiniTool MovieMaker, an all-in-one video editor developed by MiniTool® Software Ltd., is the best alternative to Movie Maker. The video editing software can help you make and edit videos easily and quickly.
Why Choose MiniTool MovieMaker
1. Support for multi-track editing
MiniTool MovieMaker has a clean, flexible multi-track timeline to handle complex projects with ease. This feature allows you to layer video clips, audio files, and effects on separate tracks for independent control. You can seamlessly synchronize your footage with music, create picture-in-picture effects, make video collages, overlay text, or produce stunning split-screen visuals. The intuitive multi-track interface makes the process smooth and accessible for both beginners and advanced users.
2. Provides an extensive array of visual effects
- Text: We hear you on those tired, old, inflexible text styles. The best free alternative to Movie Maker packs a lot of video text templates. Specifically, MiniTool MovieMaker offers titles, captions, and credits. With just a few mouse clicks, you can apply a suitable text template to your video.
- Transitions: MiniTool MovieMaker offers video transitions to help you create engaging videos. (For digital videos, transitions can be more visual and obvious, such as fades, wipes, dissolves, and more.) The best Movie Maker alternative offers a collection of clean and modern graphic transitions that would suit many video projects, from creative to commercial.
- Effects and filters: To make your videos more beautiful and outstanding, MiniTool MovieMaker offers a lot of effects and filters to help you complete the task. For instance, you can add frames to video clips, and you can change the color of any video clip, etc. Of course, the steps are very easy. You just need to double-click on the clip you want to add an effect or filter to, then download the desired one, and finally click the + icon to add it to the selected clip.
- Animated elements: With this best Windows 10 Movie Maker alternative, you will find different kinds of stickers like emojis, hearts, covers, arrows, props, shapes, etc. In the preview area, you can change the size, rotation, and position of the animated element you just added. Whether you are creating a vlog video, a TikTok video, or an Instagram video, there are tons of stickers in the Elements library to help you get everyone to witness your story!
3. Enhance your videos with common and easy-to-use editing tools
- Split and trim videos: The best Movie Maker alternative not only helps you easily and quickly cut a large clip into smaller sections without losing any frames in the process but also lets you remove unwanted frames from the start or end of a clip.
- Crop videos: Its cropping tool enables you to resize your videos to suit different social media platforms. For example, quickly crop video to square (Instagram), crop videos to portrait (TikTok), crop videos to landscape (YouTube), and more.
Download this free video editing application to give this one a try.
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Bottom Line
Windows Movie Maker is a good choice for us to create a movie. However, Movie Maker was officially discontinued without a replacement on January 10, 2017. MiniTool MovieMaker is the best Windows Movie Maker alternative. It is easy to use yet powerful. With this tool, you can easily create a wonderful movie.
Should you have any questions or suggestions about MiniTool MovieMaker, contact the support team via [email protected] for help.
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About The Author
Position: Columnist
Cora is a tech writer specializing in digital media workflows, with over six years of hands-on experience in video post-production, media transcoding, and screen capture. Her writing is always clear and practical. Cora also produces in-depth software reviews for users across skill levels to help them find the right tool and enjoy video editing.
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