How to Handle Movement of Source Video Files in Windows Live Movie Maker

Just a heads up for those of you using Windows Live Movie Maker to edit your own videos.

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been shooting and editing a video for work about my digital profile (which ended up being a digital conversationalist). My video editor of choice has always been Windows Live Movie Maker because it was free and there was no risk of financial loss if I found that it didn’t cut the mustard. I’ve made over forty videos with it now but I am thinking perhaps I should up the ante a bit as I get some better gear but it’ll do for the time being.

Anyway, sometimes during my haste in putting a video together I am importing source videos from everywhere including external devices, my desktop and network storage (which is where it is supposed to go). If you move all of the video source files after editing you end up breaking the video project as it can no longer find the files it used in the final cut. Luckily, there’s an easy way to fix this up.

Before you do anything though make sure you backup your video project! You have to back it up in order to get it back in case something goes wrong!

Simply close your video project and then open up the video project in a text editor like Notepad or Notepad++ (my favourite). It should look something like this:

Windows Live Movie Maker Video Project in Notepad++

All the video project file contains is plain text formatted in XML (eXtensible Markup Language) which is similar to the HTML (HyperText Markup Language) that structures webpages.

All you need to do is for each affected file, update the “filePath” attribute with the correct path. Once completed, simply save the file and then open it up in Windows Live Movie Maker. If done correctly, you should find that the video project opens without any complaints.