FRAPS avi to Windows Movie Maker resolution degradation problem.

Windows Movie Maker (WMM) opens my FRAPS avi game capture fine and it looks fine in the WMM previewer. However when I drag the video from WMM's previewer box down to its storyboard area the resolution gets terribely degraded, as to be unusable. Any suggestions.

That doesn't make any sense really, it should play fine in the viewer whether it's in the Import area or on the Storyboard. The only thing I can think of is you may be confusing resolution quality with the previewer's smoothness of playback.

For instance, if the file you imported is extremely large, segments of it will play smoothly in the previewer but the entire project loaded into the storyboard may bog it down considerably. If even a small 30 second or so clip loaded into the Storyboard causes playback problems or lower image quality though, there's definitely something wrong.

Do you have Windows fully updated and have the latest DirectX and all that? If you have any questions about Movie Maker and are new to it, here's a great support forum for it:
http://www.windowsmoviemakers.net/Forums/Default.aspx

BTW, are you using Vista by any chance?

I used to use WMM but now I exclusively use VirtualDub with the Xvid and LAME codecs. With WMM you have added features like titles, transitions, special effects and audio mixing, but I often had problems using the transitions and effects. WMM is a fairly minimalist program that can't handle large complex projects very well without glitches. It's the single most talked about issue when people new to it have problems.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Six_Gun,

Thanks for your reply. I figured it out, through much heart-ache.

Turns out that the WMM previewer is a "proxy", it is low quality on purpose to speed up the editing process and is not what the final product quality will be.

WMM Help doesn't tell you this of course, I had to search around on the web for two days to find that out.

Well that and many other reasons, mainly much better image quality per file size is why I use VirtualDub and Xvid.

There's nothing like VDub for previewing, frame advancing, enhancing, etc. The preview window shows the clips in their original quality, quite nice.

Once you know the hotkeys, editing frames is quite easy too. Left and Right arrows for Reverse and Forward. Enter and Space for Play and Stop.