Friday 31 October 2014
After Windows 7, Movie Maker changed drastically. There is no time line. In my opinion the timeline is fundamental to video editing (also to music and audio). The lack of a timeline in my view renders Movie Maker in Windows 7 and beyond useless.

 WMM 2.6 


 Luckily there is a work around. Download Windows Movie Maker 2.6 and install on your Windows 7 or Windows 8 computer. http://on-msn.com/wmm26 

HD Format 


 A couple of other things are worth doing also. Windows Movie Maker does not always support HD formats. To get around this you need to install some plugins (very easy and straight forward) You can find the plugins here www.stmedia.org/dl/hdplugins.zip 

 The plugins will give you the following resolutions to save your movie to:


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


 Look on your drive for your Movie Maker 2.6 which will be in a location something like the following:

 C:\program files\Movie Maker
 OR C:\Program Files (x86)\Movie Maker 2.6 

Copy the prx files to the shared folder as follows…………

 C:\program files\Movie Maker\shared\profiles 
 OR C:\Program Files (x86)\Movie Maker 2.6\shared\profiles 

 If the “profiles” folder does not exist then go ahead and create it.


Sunday 26 October 2014
alvin87I was sad to hear this week that Alvin Stardust had died. I spent quite a bit of time with Alvin in the late 80's producing an albums worth of my songs with him. The tracks never saw the light of day so I'll attach a compilation of them to this post. I know Alvin was not his real name but I always called him that and he always referred to himself that way. He called me a while back and we talked about dusting off these recordings and trying to do something with them. Clearly that must have been before he embarked on the album that he planned to release in November but I now realise he was suffering with cancer at the time he called. He never mentioned it of course. I remember him as quite a gentleman always very polite to everyone and never the pop star. He came to Newcastle several times to work on the recordings and sometimes stayed at my home in Whitley Bay. I didn't drive in those days so we got the metro to the studio in Newcastle each morning. He didn't bat an eyelid and nobody recognised him. I did see the pop star side one time however. After one set of sessions he was due to catch an early flight next morning so he was staying in a hotel. I dropped him off there in a taxi and as he went up to reception he said "watch this". He checked in and on some subterfuge or other asked to see the duty manager. When she arrived he turned on the charm and a glowing pop star smile. The manageress asked if he would mind having his photo taken in front of the hotel and insisted on upgrading him to a suite of rooms at no extra charge. As she went off  to make these arrangements he turned and winked at me and said "works every time" !