Zi6 and Movie Maker Solution
PC users who own Kodak Zi6 digital camcorders have flooded the video forums asking how to edit their footage in Windows Movie Maker.
The Zi6 saves in mov format, which Movie Maker can't read.
After scouring the forums, I tried about a dozen suggested solutions, this re-encorder and that one, until discovering a simple solution of my own -- a solution that had already been discovered by a guy named PapaJohn at papajohn.org.
By the way, I'm running Windows XP on an AMD Sempron 2800+ at 1.6 GHz with 1.5 gig of memory, not the most powerful of machines to be trying to edit video.
Anyway, here's the skinny: change the suffix of your video from mov to avi. For example, I renamed zi6_9320.mov to zi6_9320.avi. It will then load into Movie Maker.
At this point, you will not be able to edit it in Movie Maker. HOWEVER, you can drop it on the timeline, then go through the steps to save it to your computer as a wmv. PapaJohn has three custom profiles you can find half way down on this page. Download and put them in your c:\Program Files\Movie Maker\Shared\Profiles folder. They'll show up in your drop down list of 'Other Settings' choices when you save a movie.
Since I'm shooting in high def, I used his HighDef (HD) Widescreen 16:9 profile.
Also, PapaJohn suggests that if dragging the file to the timeline doesn't work the first time, try importing the file and dragging it to the time line a second or a third time. For me, it worked right away.
After Movie Maker is done churning and spits out zi6_9320.wmv, or whatever your file is called, import THAT file into Movie Maker and you can edit it.
When edits are complete, save the file again, using the same profile but a different file name (zi6_9320_final.wmv?) and you're done.
Here's a some YouTube footage taken while zooming down the road. The 12-minute mov file was 808 meg. The resulting wmv, after one time through Movie Maker, was 576 meg. After editing, in which I cut the video from 12 minutes to 7 and added the music and titles, the final wmv, uploaded to YouTube, was 308 meg.
Permalink for "Zi6" Posted 20 Aug 2009