Where are video project files hidden in Windows Photo video editor?

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I discovered that Windows Photo has a pretty good basic video editor hidden in it.

My wife used it to edit a family video. Then she wanted to save the project (clips and project file, not just the final product) to USB drive.

Photo only gives you one option: Save to OneDrive. The claim is that other OneDrive devices running Photo will then be able to see the Project.

However, careful inspection of OneDrive yields no file with the title of the project and nothing that obviously looks like a video editing project file.

Does anybody know how they pulled this off and where they have hidden the project information? It can't be buried in the Registry, because that wouldn't transfer through OneDrive.

4 Answers

Every video clip used to create a new video, no matter what the source, is first copied to my C: SSD drive into my 'Pictures' folder. I found the program created a new folder called 'Video Projects' in my Pictures folder. The program does not delete these videos copied to my C: SSD drive when the program is through with them. I must go in and manually delete the working copies of videos the program makes. C:\Users\Your_User_Name\Pictures\Video Projects

There were two reasons I was looking into this.

1) For a video project, set the duration for all the photos in a storyboard to something other than the default. (Why isn't this built in?) and;

2) On another project, reset the duration that I'd set on a bunch of photos so it could auto sync with music.

So, I looked into this a bit, and for reference the data is stored in an Sqlite database called MediaDb.v1.sqlite located by default here (replace YOURUSERNAME) C:\Users\YOURUSERNAME\AppData\Local\Packages\Microsoft.Windows.Photos_8wekyb3d8bbwe\LocalState

You can load the database using an Sqlite reader like DB Browser however you can't update it because it contains an unrecognised database collation (column character set) called NoCaseUnicode which you can about more here

There are others who are reporting similar problems trying to access this file.

I just finished a short project. I noticed an option to make a backup (click the three dots in the top right corner). That created a .vdp file. The file is 35 MB. The total size of the pictures and audio track is 30.1 MB, so it looks like it puts everything into this one .vdp file. The idea, as I understand it, is that you can take this .vdp file with you and import it into the video editor on a different computer (or same computer with new hard drive) and resume working on your video from there.

Of course relying on a proprietary file, in my opinion, is not great. You're trusting that Microsoft will continue to support the file format in the future. And as we've seen, over time, Microsoft has a habit of dropping support for popular applications that they bundle with Windows. Make sure you hang on to those original photos/videos!

My saved videos were located in c/Pictures/wallpapers/Video Projects

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