.wmv to .avi?

[Rusty2286]

Hey, I was wanting to add some videos i made with windows movie maker to pinnacle. When I try to add them nothing happens, does anyone know how I can add .wmv to pinnacle? If not then what i would rather do is convert the videos I made to .avi or .mpeg. Does anyone know any free converters that will convert .wmv to .avi or .mpg? I have some but non of them will accept .wmv. Also if there's a way to keep most if not all the quality of video (so the video looks the same)? Or can I just change the file type any way and not have to convert it? Well if anyone can help me out, I appreciate it. Thanks, bye.

[thinger62]

Moviemaker will let you save it as an avi. Next time that would be easiest. I'm guessing you can just open the wmv and resave it as avi. You would lose some quality going the wmv to avi route and then to whatever format you want, as opposed to saving it as an avi the first time and then rendering in a different program.

[Rusty2286]

Hey, thanks I didn't know you could save as avi. I saved the video as .avi, but Pinnacle Studio still won't except it for some reason?
Do you know why? Thanks, Bye.

[Rusty2286]

Hey here is what the message says and how I saved the video with windows. If I did it correctly.

[Rusty2286]

I guess not.

[thinger62]

Well, I'm not sure what that message says, and I'm not a moviemaker or pinnacle expert. I've had one experience with a pinnacle product, never again. What are you trying to do? Can you just do all the editing you want in Moviemaker, save it as an avi, and then just use a program to convert/author and burn? You could use tmpgenc to convert. For authoring and burning, I use Ulead Moviefactory almost exclusively. It's simple and easy.

[Rusty2286]

Yeah, I could do that I guess but, it would be more work, sort of. What I want to do is use pinnacle to author a dvd and with the .avi video clips i have on my comp. I burnt a dvd movie with pinnacle exacly like I wanted, except the dvd was just various video clips and the whole dvd was around 15 mins long, so pinnacle might mess up on bigger files. But the structure of the dvd that I want, I know how and can make it with pinnacle, so thats why I want to use it. Since I can do stuff with movie maker that I can't do with studio and vice versa, I was going edit most of the video's with movie maker and just a couple with pinnacle, but then put all the videos together with menus I created and everything in pinnacle so I could author the dvd. I could do like you said and just edit all of it with movie maker and then use some other dvd author program to burn it with. But I have pinnacle and don't really want to buy anymore programs. But I can so I might do that. But the message I get in pinnacle is just "File movie.avi cannot be opened." But there's another .avi file in the same folder and I can put that in pinnacle so it has to be something from movie maker? I don't know. Yeah I had a previous version of pinnacle and I couldn't get anything done on it, but studio 9 seems to be working, but i haven't tried a big file so... Well thanks for helping.

[thinger62]

This is a stab in the dark, but is one file a dv type 1 and one a dv type 2? I vaguely remember Moviemaker only accepting or outputing one of the two. I can never keep them straight though.

[Rusty2286]

I don't know, the only thang I can find on movie maker is DV-AVI (NTSC). Thats the only one I can find on how to save (render) the video as .avi. I can't find anything that says dv type? Sorry.

[thinger62]

A quick search found this:

http://blogs.msdn.com/kclemson/archive/2004/11/20/267382.aspx

That might be your problem, sounds like it is. If you look in the tools section, there is a tool for converting from type 1 to type2 and vice versa. I think it is called dvdate, or something like that. I've never used it, but it may work.

[Rusty2286]

Hey, thanks a lot thinger, that helped me out. Thank You.

Rusty

[thinger62]

You're welcome, good luck.