It had been awhile since I used my Sony HandyCam to capture much of anything, but I made use of it Wednesday night at the kids’ first Christmas program.

The HandyCam records first to MiniDV videotape, then later I usually use the camera’s recording feature to save video files to a MemoryStick. Problem was, neither MemoryStick was working for me. I couldn’t tell if it was the MemoryStick slot on my camera or if my MemorySticks were bad.

I did have a second option, which I had not liked in the past. The camera has a mini-USB slot which lets my laptop capture video that it plays. Historically, the camera sends video to the computer that is much darker than what I see in the camera’s screen.

This time was no exception, except that I had a fix. Before, I had used the Sony ImageMixer software (by Pixel) to capture the video, and that program had no way to adjust the brightness of the image. This time, I tried Windows Movie Maker, which comes standard with Windows XP Professional.

Windows Movie Maker has a respectable set of features. I added a title screen and used a simple curtain-drawing transition between clips. I was able to lighten the video acceptably, but I did want a way to brighten up dark areas while toning down spotlights. I was a little encumbered by what I could do with the audio. The user gets Mute, Fade In, and Fade Out as options, but the user doesn’t get to set whether the fade is over several seconds or whether it happens right away.

Of course, the other drawback is that its only output is Windows Media Video. I can probably find converters for MP3 so that I can put videos on my Palm. Some older Windows machines have trouble reading the files that I’ve generated with WMM before.