Problems with rendering a Windows Movie Maker video

Question

I've used Windows Movie Maker plenty of times before and I've never had a problem with it... until now. I went to choose the "save to my computer" option so my video would render and after it was about 10% done this message popped up:

"Windows Movie Maker cannot save the movie to the specified location. Verify that the original source files in your movie are still available, the the saving location is still available, and that there is enough free disk space available."

My files I used in the video are exactly where they were when I imported them to Movie Maker, the folder I'm trying to save the video is just fine, and I have plenty of disk space available; and the problem still comes up the same way. I tried saving it to an other place and the same thing happened. I even tried saving it to my flash drive and the same thing happened. I even tried turning my computer off and back on and nothing changed. I've looked it up online and gotten no help. I did try making a BS video with other footage and it worked but when I tried making a BS video with the same footage in this video the problem came up again, so I think it has something to do with one of my video files but I don't know.

Answer 1

This assumes that all the material, all the video clips are on your local disk and your telling Windows Movie Maker to save these in the same folder. Do all the clips have a suffix that is acceptable to Windows Movie Maker (see below for a complete list)? e.g. are these all .avi files?

How many clips are in the video? One or more clips may be at issue. To isolate, first save your project as it is, then remove one clip and save this as minus one. Test? if there is no change then remove another clip, save as minus 2. Test? If there is still issues then proceed to remove each clip one at a time and save each of these versions until you find the clip(s) that are having an issue.

Once you locate the offending clip(s) take these to another computer, and see if you get the same results. Report back.

MORE info from Microsoft:

You can import files with the following file name extensions into Windows Movie Maker to use in your project:

Video files: .asf, .avi, dvr-ms, .m1v, .mp2, .mp2v, .mpe, .mpeg, .mpg, .mpv2, .wm, and .wmv

Audio files: .aif, .aifc, .aiff, .asf, .au, .mp2, .mp3, .mpa, .snd, .wav, and .wma

Picture files: .bmp, .dib, .emf, .gif, .jfif, .jpe, .jpeg, .jpg, .png, .tif, .tiff, and .wmf

Answer 2

It seems it is one of your source videos that is causing the problem.

You can try making one test video out of half of them and another test out of the rest. If one fails and the other succeeds, you can continue to split the failing source videos in half until you find the one that is causing the problem.