I'm trying to edit together a small video. I know that Movie Maker is probably the least powerful program out there, but it's what I've got to work with. Anyways, on to the problem:

When I preview the clips I've imported everything works fine. However, when I play my movie from the storyboard along the bottom of the screen Movie Maker decides to start dropping frames for some reason (even though if I preview my clips they run perfectly, so I know this isn't a slow computer issue). Does anybody know what's going on here?

I'm using DivX 6.5.1 avis. They run all choppy in DivX player and won't run at all in Media Player or Media Player Classic, but I assume that's because I haven't updated Media Player in a long time (and like I said they play properly in the movie maker software). Help?

Mine does that too; I'm not really sure what the problem is, but if it helps, the video should export okay.

Oh. I guess that's fine then.

I have another question: what settings should I use when I save the project as a video file? I want maximum quality, I don't care about the filesize too much.

Just use Mpeg-4 quicktime.

Yeah, movie maker's preview doesn't upscale the player to your currently installed player. It's stupid like that, so it'll drop frames.

And just use the obviously highest settings. In the future, you should try some of the other free alternatives. There's one for linux that works on windows that seems to do just fine, but I can't remember the name.

I agree with Kirby. There are much better free alternatives.

Personally, I use Wax.

There's also Wink, which is used for capturing a recording from a desktop application such as Photoshop. Useful for recording how-to videos.