How to Compress and Edit 4K Video with Windows Movie Maker?

More and more recording devices are now 4K capable, even some smartphone such as iPhone 5SE/6S/6S Plus, Google Nexus 6/6P/5X and HTC One M9 has the ability to capture 4K video. As for editing 4K video on Windows, many professional video editing program has now empowered with the ability to deal with 4K resolution video. How about working 4K video with Windows Movie Maker, the best free Windows movie maker application - which is designed with simplicity, creativity and fuctionality for beginners?

4K to Windows Movie Maker

Minimum system requirements to edit 4K with WMM

To edit 4K video on PC with WMM, make sure that your PC meet the following minimum system requirements:

Integrated Graphics solutions that support 4K external displays (8GB RAM recommended with integrated graphics solutions):

- 4th generation Intel® Core™ processor family (Intel Haswell based CPUs) - (Intel® Iris™ Pro Graphics 5200 / Intel® Iris™ Graphics 5100, Intel® HD Graphics 5000 / 4600 / 4400 / 4200)
- AMD A10-7800 APU

Discrete Graphics cards that support 4K external displays:
Nvidia GeForce
GeForce® GTX™ 970
GeForce® GTX™ 980
GeForce® GTX™ TITAN Z
GeForce® GTX™ TITAN Black
GeForce® GTX™ TITAN
GeForce® GTX™ 780 & 780 Ti
GeForce® GTX™ 770
GeForce® GTX™ 760 & 760 Ti
GeForce® GTX™ 750 & 750 Ti
GeForce® GTX™ 690, 680, 670, 660, 660 Ti, 650, 650 Ti BOOST, 650 Ti
AMD Radeon™ HD 7000 Series or better

Work unsupported 4K video with Windows Movie Maker

However, even if your computer meets the requirements listed above, you may still have problems to edit 4K video with Windows Movie Maker. The main reason is that Windows Movie Maker only support certain 4K file formats, such as 4K AVI/WMV/MP4/MOV, if your 4K video are in are other compatible file formats, such as 4K MPEG-4 AVC/H.264, 4K H.265/HEVC, 4K Prores, 4K XAVC S, etc, Windows Movie Maker will fail to import them.

To fix this format or codec incompatible issue, you can download a third-party video conversion app such as Pavtube Video Converter to convert all unsupported 4K video to Windows Movie Maker best editable WMV file format. If your computer is not powerful enough to deal with 4K video, you can compress 4K to 1080p for smooth video editing with WMM.

Edit 4K video with WMM alternative

Besides compressing and transcoding 4K video for Windows Movie Maker, the program can also act as a simple 4K video editing tool to allow you do do some basic video editing work. You can trim or cut 4k video to remove unwanted parts or segments, merge separate video clips into one file(Windows Movie Maker only enables you to combine contiguous clips
), split large files into small parts by file size, length(Windows Movie Maker only allows you to split a large video into two small items) or count, crop the black bars around the video frame, add video/image/transparent text watermark to video, apply special rendering effects to video, etc.

Step by step to convert/compress 4K video for editing with Windows Movie Maker

Step 1. Import 4k files to the program.
Run the program on your computer and click "File" > "Add Video/Audio" or "Add from Folder" to add 4K files to the program.

Step 2: Choose Windows Movie Maker supported file formats.
Click the pull down menu of "Format", then you will be able to select a Windows Movie Maker supported format from the output format profile, choose "HD Video">"WMV HD (*.wmv)" as your output format for editing HD video on Windows Movie Maker.

Step 3: Edit video(optional).

Check an item to active the "Video Editor" function, then click the pencil like icon on the top tool bar to open the "Video Editor" window, you can trim video length, crop video black bars, add watermark, apply sepcial rendering effect, remove/replace audio in video, etc.

Step 4: Click "Convert" button to convert video to Windows Movie Maker

Once the conversion is finished, you can click "Open Output Folder" button to get the output files effortlessly, and now you are ready to import and edit any files with Windows Movie Maker. Just import the converted files to Windows Movie Maker for editing via its "Import video" option.

What's Next? Price: $35