Good to see the Windows Live Wire blog start to focus on Wave 3, this time with a good post by Eric Doerr on Windows Live Movie Maker.  If you’ve taken a look at Windows Live Movie Maker, you’ve no doubt noticed that it is, well, lacking.  Eric explains in the post, however, that because of advances in the way that we create and use digital video, Microsoft decided to start over from scratch with Windows Live Movie Maker, including revamping the UI to make use of the “ribbon” interface common to Office 2007 applications.

After a lot of investigation, we decided to start fresh. We were inspired by the video-sharing solutions that were starting to spring up, and we were intrigued by the rapid advancements in graphics hardware, especially the increasingly capable GPUs on the latest video cards. And we were impressed with the results realized by Microsoft Office 2007 and the new "ribbon" user interface model.

The new user interface for Windows Live Movie Maker is much simpler than the Windows Movie Maker, perhaps a little too simple according to some comments on the Live Wire post.  The “Timeline” is gone from the current beta version, and the commenters are asking for it back.  Good thing this is still an early beta.

Windows Live Movie Maker should make it much easier to publish to the web, according to the blog post:

Meanwhile, the Windows Live Photo Gallery folks had been working on a plug-in SDK for sharing video and photos. We think the lines between photos and video are blurring fast, and we know that our customers use lots of different sharing services, and we think that's cool, too. So, we decided to make the plug-in platform support photos and video and use it in both the Photo Gallery and Movie Maker. We're providing one plug-in for Movie Maker (to Soapbox on MSN Video), but we expect to see most of the sharing sites supported fairly quickly.

It’s pretty obvious that Windows Live Movie Maker is still in its early stages of development, but still we appreciate the explanation of what we’re seeing now, and at least a hint of what to expect.  Check out the blog post for more.