Create HD Videos in Windows Movie Maker For Windows XP

As you all know, I like to dabble in video making. Well, if you have seen a Bauer-Power episode or two you would. Or perhaps you have dropped by my random video site. Anyhoo, long story short, I like videos!
For Christmas (Actually, a little after Christmas) my wife let me buy an el cheapo HD video camera. It was pretty cool, and would shoot videos in 1280x720 resolution in .mov format. The problem I had though, was that I like to edit all my movies in Windows Movie Maker. I just feel that for a free video editor, it can do quite a bit. So what’s the problem? Well, my computer at home was running Windows XP, and the Movie Maker that is installed on Windows XP doesn’t handle HD format. Windows Vista Ultimate does, but not Windows XP Professional.

Well I happened upon a couple of plugin’s that will allow you to output your Movie Maker files in HD WMV format!

I have packaged them all up in a convenient ZIP Package here:

(WMM HD DOWNLOAD)

The resolutions available in the package are:

• 1280x720
• 1440x1080
• 1920x1080
• 960x720

To use them, make sure Movie Maker is not running, then copy the *.prx files from my zip file to:

C:\program files\Movie Maker\shared\profiles

Now don’t get too excited. There are some requirements to use these resolutions.

• Windows Movie Maker 2 for Windows XP
• High End GPU
• Windows Media 9 or Later
• 1GB of RAM or more

If your PC meets these requirements you are good to go!
Please note that if your camera doesn’t shoot in HD, you can still output in the higher resolutions, however it will not magically make your video “High Definition.” Crappy quality video in will produce crappy video out.
Now that you found out about this, I am sure all of you will start editing your HD movies in Movie Maker now right? Of course you will!
I’m curious to know what software you normally use to edit your HD videos if it isn’t Movie Maker. Let me hear your favorites in the comments!

Technorati Tags: windows,xp,movie,maker,hd,plugin

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My New Favorite Blog Editor

So Sundance walks over to my desk while I am troubleshooting a print server in Atlanta Georgia, and tells me to stop what I am doing so he can show me HIS favorite new blog editor. I played with it, and I really did like it, but that one is not my favorite blog editor.

No, my new favorite editor is a plugin for Firefox called Scribefire! It is awesome because it plugs right into my browser, which I have open all the time anyway. Not to mention that it is really intuitive, easy to use and most importantly, it allows me to schedule future blog posts!

It makes formatting a snap, and allows you to embed videos from Youtube, and pictures from Flickr with just a click of a button.

Another thing I like is that you can set it to pop open (Simply by pressing F8 I might add) in a split screen mode so you can continue to surf, and blog at the same time. That is handy if you are blogging about something from another news site, blog, or whatever. If you don't like that, you can configure it to open in a new tab or new window as well.

This is from the Scribefire website:

ScribeFire Blog Editor enables users to easily drag and drop
formatted text from the web into their blog(s), post entries,
take notes, and optimize their ad inventory directly through the
Firefox browser.

Additionally Blog Editor enables you to:

• Categorize and tag your blog posts
• Upload images
• Set timestamps
• Save works-in-progress as notes
• Post an entry as a draft
• Share your posts on social websites
• Upload files via FTP

Now, Sundance's choice is a good one too. In fact I believe he is working on a post explaining why the one he picked is his favorite blog client. It is certainly a good one to use, so look for his post tomorrow!

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Finding DoFollow Sites on The Easy: Firefox Extension

One of my New Years resolutions this year was to comment on more blogs, and beef up my back links a bit. Sure, Bauer-Power does okay in the Google PR department, but certainly not as good as some other blogs.

Everyone knows that the way to boost your Google PR is to score relevant back links, and lots of them! Some people don't focus on this, and wonder why their blogs don't get any traffic. Lots of people say, "Screw Google, I'm going to spend all day trying to get to the front page of Digg." They don't realize that the quality traffic they need has to be natural traffic from people that want to read your stuff. Natural traffic comes from search engines, where the people landing on your site are actually looking for something you have!

Now don't get me wrong, getting to the front page of Digg will bring you server crushing traffic, but the chances of you getting your stories up there are slim to none, unless your handle is MrBabyMan. Besides, getting to the front page of Digg, or Reddit takes a crap load of work. You have to build friends, you have to shout stories, blah, blah, blah.

Search engine traffic, on the other hand comes without you working hardly at all. I guess I shouldn't say that, I mean you do have to write some stuff worth reading, and you have to increase your back links.

According to Google Analytics, search engine traffic to Bauer-Power comprises almost 62% of my traffic. That is more than half of my traffic!

Well I aim to change that. I want it to comprise way more than that, and still have an increase in visitors at the same time. Which brings me back to my original point... Increasing back links.

So as I mentioned I am planning on commenting on more blogs. I figure ten a day is easy enough. Now, I am not going to comment on just any old blogs. They must meet two criteria items.

1. They have to be relevant to the content of Bauer-Power
2. They have to be DoFollow sites
   

For those of you not in the know, DoFollow sites allow search engine spiders to crawl their sites and categorize the outgoing links. This helps those sites boost their page rank on search engines. If a site is a NoFollow site, they add a special tag to their links telling search engines not to categorize outbound links. Hence the reason why only commenting on DoFollow sites can help your rankings.

Anyhoo, I found a cool Firefox (Or Flock! Hells yeah!) plugin that allows you to tell who's who in the zoo when it comes to DoFollow and NoFollow. It's called NoDoFollow from ZacharyFox.com.

When activated it highlights all of the links on the page in one of two colors. Blue for DoFollow, and red for NoFollow. If it's red skip ahead, if its blue go through. (Like how I rhymed that?)

Want to know if you should comment or not on Bauer-Power? Check it!


The links are blue baby so comment away!

What other methods of increasing back links do you know of? I would love to hear about them in...you guessed it, the comments!

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