Vintage Effect in Movie Maker

I'm going to be a tech Guru today, and try to outline simple steps on how to edit your movies in Windows Movie Maker to get that vintage effect. Its not even a tutorial, just a trick, for those who do not know already. Of course working in Adobe Premiere would reduce all this work, but then windows movie maker is free while Premiere costs $$$ so many of us cannot simply afford. 

Check my embedded youtube video here, if you want to feel what kind of "vintage" I'm talking about.

This is a short cropped clip of another video-just to show you a demo within 24 seconds. You can check out the full video here-it is a Nepali classic song which my cousin did a cover of.


So, what I did was I first uploaded my camera *.MOV video to Windows Live Movie Maker (the latest version), and did the editings. Like syncing music, clipping and joining etc for the whole song.

But since the new version of movie maker does not have vintage effect anymore, we have to actually download the older one. Version 6.0.

If you are using Canon DSLRs, and recording movies in MOV format, the old movie maker 6.0 wont recognize the format, so you will have to convert them into recognizable format through VLC or other software. In my case, I had already edited the video in Live Movie Maker and saved it in *.mp4 format which works in version 6.0

Import whichever footage you want the vintage effect for into Movie Maker 6.0 and drag that into the storyboard. I really liked 6.0 because it had storyboard, a much nicer interface than the present live movie maker. It also has some good effects for example the vintage film one, unlike the present skinny Movie Maker with practically nothing other than brightness control.

After importing it, now from the left hand pane select edit---->effects

This will let us see a multitude of effects. Many of them are not really useful, unless you want to make videos like those old DOS era games, or really retro/electric videos which everyone will bypass without blinking an eye.

There are three vintage effects to choose from, all under film age-old, older and oldest. I went with the film age old. Experiment and see what you like. There are varieties of effects that we can download over the internet, and I did try many of them. But honestly the ones that windows movie maker has here are way better. Does not take the authenticity away from our videos much.

So now to add effect, all we have to do is select the effect, drag and drop it over our footage in storyboard. Here's my screenshot.

just drag and drop the effects of your choice in the storyboard

Here's another screenshot where I tried the film age-older effect

Once you are satisfied with the effects, to save the movie go to file--->publish movie--->for this computer and save the highest quality that it can give us.

The downside to this method is that we really cannot have a very very high quality video as the version 6.0 has its own capacities. But since this is free, and way easier, I opted for it. And that was for a youtube video. If I really was doing a high end documentary stuff,  I would expect at least to have Premiere or Final Cut Pro. Dreaming here!

So, this is the trick. You gain some, you loose some. Do you know a better way to do all this? I bet you do.

Check out the final video here