I created some music of my own (www.audiocraft.us) and imported the audio file along with the videos from the camera. I was very impressed with the effects offered-- right click on any video bit you drop into the timeline and choose effects to see what is available. I was particularly happy with "Ease In", "Ease Out" and "Slow Down". There is a pretty long list of effects, and I was very pleased to see that you can easily implement more than one effect at a time for some interesting results. The list of possible transitions was nice, this I expected. What I was surprised about next was the Titles and Credits feature which really had some time put into it.

Output options are very important-- if you want to share your video via email you don't want something many megabytes in size. Windows Movie Maker provides some good options here as well. Choose "Publish Move" and you have the option to publish to: "This computer", "DVD", "Recordable CD", "Email" and "Digital video camera". I chose "This computer" and chose a filename and target directory before getting some sizing options. You can choose "best quality for playback on my computer", or "Compress to:" where you can select a size to which you'd like to limit the size of the video, and finally some "more settings" including bit rate selections with examples of their use and quality (for example: DVD Quality (3Mbps), Windows Media HD 1080p (7.8 Mbps) and Windows Media VHS Quality (1Mbps)).

If I could request one feature it would be to have a live preview of the effects so you can see a sample of what you are doing to your video as you select them. It took a few seconds each time I selected an effect or two and said "OK" to see my results in the project. A great program for free that I highly recommend playing with next time you need to work with video on your Vista system.