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Bad home movies? Shudder! They can be longer than many prison sentences, home to multimedia’s worst excesses and, all too often, guaranteed to leave you trying to slit your wrists with a Pringle.

However, with Windows Vista, you have no excuse for such nonsense. None. We’re going to war on bad home movies. Right now!

The good news is that with Movie Maker you immediately avoid the biggest trap. It’s a simple editor that focuses on the important things.

Not only don’t you need hundreds of transitions, effects, and other flashy tools, you’re usually better off without them. It’s not for nothing that the average director’s favourite transition is the humble cut.

Editing in action

Let’s step through a holiday video. Don’t worry about the mouse clicks yet; that’s the easy part. Raw footage is where every project starts. The cardinal rule is: shoot everything you can, then throw out almost as much. A ruthless editor is a good editor.

Exactly what to keep will depend on your subject matter and intended audience, but you’ll never go wrong by treating it as a professional project, rather than doing things you know are wrong.

One thing I always do when starting a new project is to sit down and list everything that annoys me in similar things I’ve seen, and then avoid doing them even if they seem like a great idea at the time.

Here, let’s look at the classic roller-coaster shot. On my list, the number one ‘gotcha’ is the first-person shakycam as someone, usually my father, desperately tries to keep the camcorder to his face.

It never works. Ignoring the blurring of the world, and the sick-making bouncing of the camera on every twist and turn, you’ll never be able to emulate the experience of being on that ride. So what do you do? You film it anyway. The problem isn’t the footage; it’s the execution. You also film the exterior of the ride, and everything else you’re going to cut. Then get the shears.

First of all, the establishing shot. That should be easy enough – especially if the family is there, waving and looking nervously at the ride’s biggest lunch-launching moment. Next, cut – a simple cut, nothing fancy – to the first-person camera, as the rollercoaster car pulls out of the station.

Our list tells us that we don’t want to stick with this too much, so now, we cut to another external shot of the coaster pulling away towards the big loop. Obviously, it’s not your car. That doesn’t matter. As it plummets, snap cut again to the fi rst-person camera, showing a family member’s screaming reaction. Cut back to the external.

If you’ve got a good bit of first-person camera of a drop, or a turn, or a particular bit of scenery, slip it in. Finally, cut to the family waddling uncertainly out of the gates, and closer up shots of reactions; cries of “Again!” or “Never again!”

It’s a simple editing job. One transition (Cut) and one editing tool (Trim). However, when you play the video, nobody will care about the technology behind it, just the result. And believe it or not, that’s the big secret of editing. Simplicity always wins out over glitz, and less really is more.

Of course, there is scope to play around with the more complicated effects as well. If you’re building a montage of photos, picking a transition to go between them can look good. Even then, though, the keep-it simple mantra applies. A page-curl may look good, but a page-curl followed by a barwipe, followed by a dissolve, followed by a shatter is guaranteed to look tacky.

Always try to stick to one effect, one editing style, one (rough) length for your individual segments, and the whole thing will flow. It may seem like overkill for a family video, but when you’ve got the tools to do better, why settle for less?

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One of the easiest ways to make your home movies look better is to add some effects, transitions and titles to them, lending them a professional looking finish. Before, these flashy animations have been limited to expensive editing packages.

If you’ve got Windows Vista, however, you can do all these things by using Movie Maker. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to do them.

1. Effect / Transition

These are the two main animations available to you. Effects work on individual clips, making them sepia-toned or blurred, or whatever else you choose. Transitions link two clips – tearing, shattering, wiping and pushing the screen.

2. Stay Controlled

Use as few transitions as possible. One or two can look good, but more than that gets confusing, irritating or, worst of all, tacky.

Think about how often the sappiest of romantic comedies wipe between scenes via a giant heart.

3. Watch the speed

Click on Storyboard then Timeline to switch editing modes, and drag the block representing the transition. The maximum length is the length of the second clip – although that could be a montage if you need it to be longer.

4. Titles

These are handled separately, with presets available for one-line titles, two-line titles, and a longer list of credits. You can choose the font and colour, but not a great deal more. The alternative is to create image-based titles in any art package.

5. Text Control

There are two types of titles – those before or after the movie, and text overlays. The former are like a movie clip, and can have effects added over the top. Overlays can be moved within a clip, and scaled, but you don’t get the effects.

6. Mix and Match

Overlays aren’t locked to a clip, so you can stretch them out to caption an extended sequence, and it all happens underneath them. The animation attached will only play at the start and end, rescaling as you move the clip around.

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