I'm thinking this is a resource problem. I have replicated this on my own system. I have a 30 minute long project with about 30 video clips and 100+ photos. If I scroll through the project timeline too quickly, some video clips will show an error icon.
When I double click on the video to "fix" the problem, I'm prompted to delete the "corrupted" video clip. If I scroll through the project slowly, I do not encounter this problem.
Windows Live Movie Maker project files are very small (my entire 30 minute project is under 50KB). I'm guessing that WLMM doesn't cache any thumbnails of your videos. The project file simply contains locations of video clips and photos, timestamps, instructions
on what wipes/fades/animations to use, durations, etc., but it doesn't contain any graphical elements. This means that each time you open your project, WLMM has to recreate the thumbnails of your video clips. To do this, it has to open each video clip in
memory in order to create the thumbnail. However, it appears that WLMM doesn't open any video clips that are off-screen. So if 90% of your project is off-screen, 90% of your project won't get thumbnailed. Thumbnails will only be created when you scroll
and a new video clip scrolls onto the timeline area. I watched my memory footprint for WLMM as I scrolled slowly through my project and sure enough, each time a new video clip scrolled on screen and a thumbnail was created, the memory footprint would jump
10+ MB.
Since this is the behavior of WLMM, when you scroll quickly and several video clips pop onto your screen at once, WLMM tries to open all those clips to create thumbnails. This probably leads to a race condition. Several clips all competing for the same system
resources and some clips get left out in the cold. WLMM probably figures that if a clip isn't thumbnailed within a certain timeframe, the video might be corrupt and the error icon is displayed instead. If you scroll slowly, only one or two video clips are
loaded at a time and system resources aren't clogged.
Kind of a pain to have to scroll through a long project slowly, but it's the only way I've found to prevent the "corrupt" icon from appearing. It would be nice to have some thumbnail caching taking place so that WLMM doesn't have to open every video file every
time you open your project.
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