Freezing and Refusing to Save

[mxchibandit]

I recently finished http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mk8ein-uXlo using Windows Movie Maker, and I have to say it was absolutely a test of patience. It's not my computer, I'll just start off by saying that. However, WMM has a habit of freezing for virtually no reason. I couldn't even rely on the autosave feature, I just had to commit ctrl+s to reflex. Every clip, every trim, every effect, every minor change I'd have to make sure I hit ctrl+s because like clockwork, within five or ten minutes the software would freeze. I'd open the task manager, CPU usage would be at like 11%, but the program was still nonresponsive. Had to end process and reopen the program constantly, and once my video got past the one-minute mark it started taking longer to open the project file than the time I was given by the program to actually work on it.

That, and there was another problem I ran into. My video was too complicated to save. After twenty seconds, not kidding. As it was a work in progress, I would occasionally publish the movie to review it elsewhere. After I had added twenty seconds worth of clips though, apparently my video became too complicated for WMM to publish. It would get to 7% and never progress past that point. In the end, I had to break parts of the video up and publish them as separate movies without the audio, and then import those published movies and reinsert them as just really long clips. I was not particularly happy about doing this, and fiddled around with the program for a few hours trying to work around this, disabling various codecs, as I didn't want to compromise the footage quality even further, especially considering it was broadcast footage to begin with. But in the end, that's what I ended up having to do.

Has anyone come across a workaround for these issues?