EDIT YOUR OWN MOVIES

I do not recommend editing movies with Windows Movie Maker. If you attempt to save the entire film in one sweep, it will take about five hours to do, only to skew the dialogue so that it gets out of alignment. If you have no alternative, your best way is to edit the film there, then break it up into eight to ten minute segments and save it as individual, high-quality .avi files.

This tutorial is ONLY compatible with DivX Author.

Open DivX Author.

Click on Start a New Project.

Then click on "Add file." Browse to locate your movie file, then import it.

A "clip addition" window will pop up. Leave all of the settings as they are, and click OK. The file will now be in the collection. Click "Edit."

Removing scenes.

Your screen should look like this:

You will mainly be using the [ and ] buttons, along with the scissors. Hit the [ button where you want to begin a scene that will be taken out, and the ] button when you want it to end. Clicking on the scissors will trim that scene out of the movie file. You can scroll with your mouse or the arrow buttons to make your selections, or you can let the scene play through and pause it.

Once this is done, and everything is out of the movie that you want gone, hit OK. Go up and hit Output. (Trial versions, first click Menu, then cancel that screen; it will allow you to access Output. Choose where you want it, and how big it should be. (Unless your computer cannot hold big files for a couple of days, you'll not want to change the sizing, since it will diminish the playback quality.)

It will take a couple of hours to format the movie and save it into a folder entitled DivX in your My Documents folder. Read this part carefully: it will save it as a DivX file, but you must RENAME IT INTO AN AVI FILE through your computer's Control Panel. (Settings / Control Panel / Folder Options / View / Uncheck "Hide Extensions for Known File Types.") Then just open the folder, and rename the .dvx to .avi. It will ask if you really want to change the extension. Say yes. Don't forget to turn back off the view extensions options when you're done!

With that complete, you can Burn it onto a disk with Nero!