You must have heard about the free video editing software Windows Movie Maker. As one of the world’s most popular free video editor, 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 easy to use.
Windows Movie Maker
Windows Movie Maker, part of Windows Essentials 2012, is a video editing software by Microsoft and offers the ability to create and edit videos as well as to publish them on OneDrive, Facebook, Vimeo, YouTube, and Flickr. Here, you can click the following button to get the free video editing software.
MiniTool MovieMakerClick to Download100%Clean & Safe
This download link is offered by MiniTool® Software Ltd. This professional software development company offers a free download of Movie Maker, and this download is completely safe. 100% Virus-Free and Spyware-Free Guaranteed! (Of course, this company also offers other powerful tools like file recovery software, partition management software, free backup software, etc. More information can be found in Welcome to MiniTool MovieMaker.)
Main Interface
After downloading the free video editing software, you can install it on computer and then launch it to get its main interface as follows.

From this above interface, you can see that there are main 4 parts of this software: Menus 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
Here, take the following steps to create a movie with Windows Movie Maker.
First, you need to import your media files including pictures and videos 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. Related: How to Add Transition to Video with Windows Movie Maker (Beginners).
- Pan and zoom: The free video editing software let you apply 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.
- AutoMovie themes: Movie Maker offers 7 AutoMovie themes including contemporary, default, fade, cinematic, pan and zoom, sepia, and black & white, and these themes are presented in simple, good taste.
Finally, export your movie.
Reading here, you might be wondering:
“Why we need to use Windows Movie Maker Alternative?”
Now, keep reading to know more answers.
Why We Need Movie Maker Alternative
To be quite honest, Movie Maker is a good choice for us to make a movie. It is a free video editing software. It offers clear interface. It provides some special effects to help you complete your movie.
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. For instance, sometimes, users will receive this “Windows Movie Maker cannot save the movie to the specified location” error message when they are saving files.
And, they 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 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.

Have you encountered the same issue? Do you know how to solve these errors? Don’t worry if your Windows Movie Maker is not working, you can find answers from this post: Solved – Windows Movie Maker Not Working (Windows 10/8/7).
Windows Movie Maker No Sound
It is a little pity that you cannot hear the sound when you edit a wonderful movie in Windows Movie Maker. However, unfortunately, movie maker no sound issue is a common problem. Sometimes, you can easily fix this issue by converting video file format. (Here, you can find more solutions from this post: 8 Solutions: Windows Movie Maker No Sound.) However, we find this solution didn’t work in many cases. And, a lot of users finally solved the no sound issue by using a Movie Maker alternative.
Windows Movie Maker Black Bars
You must have seen a video with black bars! You must have encountered the black bars issue when using Windows Movie Maker! However, do you know how to solve this issue successfully? Here, you can find the detailed steps on how to remove black bars as long as you read this post “Tutorial: How to Remove Black Bars – Windows Movie Maker.”
Windows Movie Maker Crashes
Movie Maker crashes is an inevitable question. It is known that the freeze up crash unexpectedly will just enrage and frustrate those who are trying to work on at that time. Unfortunately, we don’t have a good method for this question, and Movie Maker won’t receive any security updates. Thus, it is necessary to look for Windows Movie Maker substitutes.
SEE! There are a lot of different problems while using Windows Movie Maker. Related: 6 Things You Need to Know About Free Windows Movie Maker. Therefore, more and more users are looking for a good alternative. Now, I guess you might be wondering:
“Which one is the best free alternative to Movie Maker?”
The Best Windows Movie Maker Alternative – MiniTool MovieMaker
There are a lot of video editing software on the market. Here, MiniTool MovieMaker, an all-in-one video editor developed by MiniTool® Software Ltd., is the best free alternative to Movie Maker. This pro-level video editing software can help you make and edit videos easily and quickly.
Why Choose MiniTool MovieMaker
1. Support for multi-track editing
As everyone knows, a lot of video editing programs always have multiple tracks so that users can edit and create cool videos. Professionals in particular benefit from multi-track editing.
Luckily, MiniTool MovieMaker contains great features for multi-track video editing and multi-track audio editing, which help you sync video segments with music or sound effects, create projects with split-screen effects or picture-in-picture effects, and so on.

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 wonderful animated 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: In order 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 makes 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 video to portrait (TikTok), crop video to landscape (YouTube), and more.
Download this free video editing application to give this one a try.
MiniTool MovieMakerClick to Download100%Clean & Safe
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Bottom Line
Windows Movie Maker is a good choice for us to create a movie. However, Movie Maker was discontinued officially 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. What’s more, you can achieve some advanced features such as animation effects, color correction in MiniTool MovieMaker easily.
Should you have any questions or suggestions about MiniTool MovieMaker, please send us emails via [email protected]. We will solve it as soon as possible.