Save A Short Clip from Recorded TV in Windows 7 Media Center

I hope to save you a couple hours of trial and error.  I recorded the nightly news and wanted to save just a 1 minute clip from it.  This seemed like a common and simple task.  After reading a number of websites, I tried a number of extra steps that wasted time.

I started with a .wtv file.  This is the file format from a Windows 7 Media Center.  One website said that the .wtv can only be viewed on the original machine it was created on.  So they suggested converting to a .dvr-ms format.  This is where my first waste of time came in.  A ton of sites talked about different applications to do this.  I tried a couple of them only to find out that Windows 7 built this feature in.  Right-click on a .wtv file and you can convert this to a .dvr-ms.

But, hold on a second, you don’t need to do this.  I copied my .wtv from one Windows 7 machine to another and it played just fine.  My hunch is that someone tried to play a .wtv on a Vista or XP machine and failed.  So, ignore the step above since you don’t need to do it.

Enter Windows Live Movie Maker 2011.  There was a version of Movie Maker that came pre-installed on Vista and was free to download on XP.  But this is a newer version that just got updated again on Sept. 30, 2010.

This is how easy it is to make your clip once you have this installed.

1. Drag your .wtv file on the movie workspace
2. Using the preview viewer, locate the beginning of your clip.  Under the Edit menu, choose Set start point.
3. Find the end of your clip.  Choose Set end point.
4. Now Save your movie.  There are different pre-configured formats.  I chose the “For computer” format.

It was that simple.  One additional thing I wanted to do was save a snapshot of one frame of video, to use as a title screen.  This was easy too.  On the Home menu, there is a Snapshot option that will save a PNG of the current frame showing on your preview window.

Movie Maker needs to pre-convert some movie file formats before you can get previews with them.  This is true for the .wtv format.  And those files are enormous.  So, when I dragged my 30 minute news clip, the filesize was about 2.4GB.  This file took about 1 hour to convert before I could start previewing it. 

I had another video saved off that I wanted to grab a clip from.  This one was much larger and much longer.  Here are the specs of how long it took me:

Filesize:	19.6GB
Video Length:	3 hours, 4 minutes
Preview Transcoding Time:	4 hours, 18 minutes

On a positive note, once the conversion completes, I was able to drag that same .wtv file into a new project and it didn’t have to convert again.  Therefore it saves off enough information into some local cache that saved me from having to wait another 4 hours.

I urge you to play around with the new Live Movie Maker.  Watch the Channel 9 Live Essentials Release video to learn a few more tricks about this and other free tools from Microsoft.