I tried Movie Maker once before but assumed I did something wrong and gave up. I just now tried it again. I started a new project consisting of nine 10-minute videos. When I added those videos the first thing I got was a message about preparing the videos for playback, something about better quality, whatever. Keep in mind so far I've done nothing in the program beyond adding the videos. According to the Task Manager the CPU is at 100 percent. After 15 minutes it's still "preparing" video 1 of 9. I clicked "Stop" and got this message:
"Preparing the videos makes a copy in a format that works with Movie Maker. If you stop this process, you won't be able to work with these videos in Movie Maker."
Now what? The videos are from my SJ4000 camera. My computer is a Toshiba laptop with a Core i5 processor, a separate graphics card and 8GB of memory, running Windows 7. I know it's not the best but shouldn't it work okay with Movie Maker?
One thing I'm also not clear about is that I have "Windows Live Movie Maker". The "Live" part leads me to believe some of this is happening in the cloud, not on the machine, and because of (presumably) slow upload speed by my internet service provider, things are going slow.
Now 20 minutes and still "preparing" video 1!