Movie Maker 2: Beyond Home Use

Movie Maker 2, the free video creation software now included with Windows XP, is a big step up from the original version. Movie Maker 2 made it easy for us to take video, still images and audio and create professional-looking (or in my case, semiprofessional-looking) video clips.

Home users are the main target for Movie Maker, but business professionals who want to create product demos and presentations with voice-overs will also find it a useful tool. Business types, however, will probably get less use out of Movie Maker 2s many new visual effects and star-wipe transitions.

One nice new feature makes it possible to save a completed video back to the digital tape in your camera. Movie Maker 2 also has standard options such as save to disk, save to the Web and save to CD/DVD.

Movie Maker will save only in Windows Media formats—which is no surprise—but I would like an MPEG converter so I can view movies on my DVD player.

Windows XP users can get Movie Maker 2 through Microsofts Windows Update at windowsupdate.microsoft.com.