Custom Camera Shutter and Letterbox Effects for Windows Movie Maker 6.0 (Updated)

Updated! This package has been updated with a camera shutter effect and white letterbox bars. Enjoy!

There have been lots of requests on the forums for a letterbox/widescreen effect which adds bars to the top and bottom of your video. Well, I went one step farther and added a couple more effects that let you have the bars appear and disappear. Here's a sample video of the moving letterbox effects.

Note: These effects take advantage of the effects architecture of Windows Movie Maker 6.0 and therefore will not work in XP. There are other solutions for XP such as a letterbox title.

There are two installers depending on whether you are running WMM 6.0 on a 32-bit or 64-bit version of Windows. The installer will put the necessary files into, C:\Program Files\Movie Maker\Shared.

Windows Movie Maker 6.0:
Blaine's Letterbox Effects (32-bit)
Blaine's Letterbox Effects (64-bit)

After installing, you'll have new effects called:

Camera Shutter - quick in and out (New)

Letterbox - static letterbox in black

Letterbox (In) - adds letterbox in black

Letterbox (Out) - removes letterbox in black

Letterbox White - static letterbox in white (New)

Letterbox White (In) - adds letterbox in white (New)

Letterbox White (Out) - removes letterbox in white (New)

Blaine's ASCII Text Effects for Windows Movie Maker 6.0 (Updated!)

Updated! This package has been updated with 3 different effects (Text, Binary and Japanese). Enjoy!

Have you heard of ASCII Art? It's a method of drawing pictures using just the characters on your keyboard. How cool would it be if you could apply an effect in Windows Movie Maker to have your photos or videos instantly converted to ASCII Art? Well with my latest ASCII Text effects you can do it very easily.

A couple notes:
These effects require a registered copy of Rehan's ShaderTFX add-on. It will also work if you are still within the trial period of ShaderTFX. If you've never installed ShaderTFX before, follow the directions on Rehan's website and test that his transitions and effects work first. If you've already installed and registered a copy of ShaderTFX, you can skip these steps.

For a preview of what these effects look like, check out Blaine's ASCII Text Effects (Updated)

For the new effects, there are two installers depending on whether you are running WMM 6.0 on a 64-bit or 32-bit version of Windows. The installer will put the necessary files into, C:\Program Files\Movie Maker\Shared.

Prerequisite: Rehan's ShaderTFX add-on (registered or unexpired!).

Windows Movie Maker 6.0:
Blaine's ASCII Text Effects (64-bit) Installer
Blaine's ASCII Text Effects (32-bit) Installer

After restarting Windows Movie Maker, you should have three new effects called:

ASCII Binary - Uses just zeroes and ones

ASCII Japanese - Uses Japanese katakana symbols

ASCII Text - Uses letters, numbers and symbols

Just apply one of these effects to your video like any other effect. Often you may want to apply a 'Brightness, Increase' once or twice, or a Blur effect to your clip before the ASCII effect. Brightness added afterwards can also help.

*Note: These effects require the architecture of WMM 6.0 and can't be made to work on versions 2.6 or earlier, nor will it work on Windows Live Movie Maker.