Windows Movie Maker 2012: How to Add Picture Overlay Over Video While Retaining Audio

Hi fredtoossi,

You can't directly overlay a photo to a video in Movie Maker, but you can achieve what you are trying to do by importing the audio for the video separately, and splitting the parts of the videos. Please follow these steps:

1. Add the video to your Movie Maker project using the Add videos and photos button.
2. Under Video Tools, set Video volume to none.
3. Click the Add music button. On the right side of the File name box, set it to videos and located the video itself. 
4. Go to the specific time where you want to put the photo.
5. Under Video Tools, click Split.
6. Go to the part where you want the photo to end, then click Split again.
7. Please take note the length of the part where you want to put the photo, then delete that part of the video.
8. Add the photo to the project, and move it to the part where you split the video.
9. Click the photo, then under Video Tools, set the Duration equal to the length of the previously deleted part.
10. Do this for the other parts of the video, you may need to adjust the videos to properly sync it with the audio.

Please let us know if you need more help.

Thanks!

Transitions subtract from the duration.  So you have to account for that.  If you were to add 5 photos, for example, each 7 seconds long that would be 35 seconds.  But if you then put 4 transitions in between them each 1.25 seconds, that's a total of 5 seconds that would be subtracted.  So you would need to only trim 30 seconds of video out to still match up.

Another option is to try and view the waveforms and see if you can match the waveform of the video track and the waveform of the sound track and make sure they are exactly the same.  But that is a bit of trial and error.

A better option would be if Movie Maker allowed for a separate (additional) video track so you could add pictures on that track and they would not affect the original audio at all and there wouldn't be a need to do all this math to try and calculate the amount of video to trim out and replace.  :)