My husband has a YouTube channel and he’s been uploading video of our band. The videos are all created in Windows Live Movie Maker (WLMM) using just a photo of the band with the accompanying music. In other words, nothing to look at but a still photo but you can hear the music play.
We followed the YouTube instructions to make the videos using WLMM which is that we add the photo, we add the MP3, then we edit the photo to be the same duration in seconds as the MP3. Then we click File, Save Movie and select standard definition, give it a name and we have a .WMV file.
Next we go to his YouTube channel and upload the video.
What’s been happening is that the “video” part of the file ends up being longer than the audio meaning that the audio ends but the picture remains on the screen and the little bar at the bottom keeps traveling for anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes. We have tried and tried to re-edit this video with no success. The video continues for more than 3 minutes after the music stops.
We can’t figure out where in the process the duration of the picture(s) is getting altered. We go back and edit and it plays fine in WLMM, we save it, up load it and then it’s changed.
I’m sure I’m probably doing something wrong, we’re new at this (as you can see from the poor quality of the slide show linked).
It doesn’t happen every time, some of them are fine. It might be happening when we try to use a picture slide show rather than just one picture but I haven’t gone back to every video to verify that.
Just a guess here, but could it be that the photo files you’re using are much larger than they need to be? I had the same problem making slide shows with music and I solved it by reducing the picture dimensions to the size of my monitor instead of leaving the photos at full size. That significantly reduced the computing power and time it took to display the pictures. Slide shows aren’t the same process as WLMM but the problem might be the same. Just in case.
I don’t think that’s it, Esox Lucius. WLMM can be a piece of garbage in a lot of ways, but it encodes to a video format and doesn’t do it real-time, so no matter how much processing power or hard disk access time it takes to render the pictures, that factor by itself isn’t going to bring them out of sync with the audio.
velvetjones, can you play back the WLMM output outside of WLMM? That can tell you if it’s something in the WLMM settings or processing that’s going wrong, or if the problem has to do with the conversion that youtube servers do after you upload.
That makes sense. There are plenty of complaints on the Internet about videos being out-of-sync after uploading to Youtube. There didn’t seem to be any conclusive fixes, but the possible cause suggested most often was a difference in the video framerate between the videos and Youtube’s processing software. I don’t know where velvetjones would look to find out the framerate of her video to see if it matches Youtube’s. (My hazy memory seems to recall that the video and audio are processed separately and then joined again afterwards, but that might be with something else and not Youtube.)
I’ve figured out that it only happens when I do a slide show using multiple photos. I’ve tried it two ways, using the button that says something like make the video the same length as the music (I can’t remember exactly what the button says) and what that button length of the song in seconds, divide it by the number of pictures and assign that duration to each picture. Sounds reasonable but what it actually did was multiply it by the number of pictures. So my 4 minute song ended up being 16 minutes.
For example. I used four pictures. I have a video that’s let’s just say 1000 seconds. I press the button and it makes the duration of each picture 250 seconds. That sounds just right except that when I look down at the length of the video in minutes it is now four times as long as it started out. Like WLMM multiplied instead of dividing.
When I tried doing it manually and assigning a duration to each photo myself and not necessarily dividing evenly I got the example I linked to above.
It’s definitely happening in WLMM and it’s only happening when I use a slide show. I originally thought I was doing something wrong but now I’m thinking that WLMM is just messed up somehow. I tried going back in to the video linked above and tweaking the duration of each picture but it’s kind of random and trial and error.
When I have more time I’ll mess with it some more. I wonder what would happen if I divided by the number of pictures twice and made that the duration of each picture. Like in the example above, make each of the four pictures 62.5 seconds?
Or maybe I will play with making the pictures smaller though I just can’t see why that would make a difference but hey, at this point I’ll try anything.
Maybe what I need is different software to create videos. I’ll gladly take suggestions for that as well.