LiveSide - News blog : Windows Live Movie Maker

WL Movie Maker: No upgrade (but you have to update anyway)

Kip Kniskern — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 05:38:03 GMT

No, this doesn’t make any sense (does it?). Yesterday we told you about a nice little blog post updating the status of Windows Live Movie Maker, which is expected to be released later this year. So today what pops up on Microsoft Download Center but a Windows Live Movie Maker Update, dated June 5:

Install this update to continue using Windows Live Movie Maker Beta until 12/30/2009. The current version of Windows Live Movie Maker Beta will expire on 6/30/2009, and will stop functioning.

As far as we can tell, there is no way to know that Movie Maker will stop functioning (other than noticing the download, or reading LiveSide, we guess), and we had to dig to find the current build number (File (to the left of Home on the ribbon)>Options). Since we just installed Movie Maker last Friday, we’re pretty sure that the build numbers are current. You should have 14.0. 8064, and the update will move you up to 14.0.8075. There also apparently are no new features in this update, which just extends the expiration date of the beta.

We looked around, and couldn’t find any mention of this, and we’re not sure what will happen on 6/30 without the update, maybe you’ll get prompted to upgrade. Kind of hard to imagine given the primitive nature of Movie Maker, but hey.

If someone could explain to us why on earth the Windows Live Movie Maker team would go to all the trouble to write up the blog post but not mention this little tidbit, we’d appreciate it.

Via a tweet from this guy.

Windows Live Movie Maker: coming this year (but not yet)

Kip Kniskern — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 06:59:50 GMT

The Lead Program Manager on the Windows Live Movie Maker team (and as it happens one of LiveSide’s oldest friends, from back in the MSN Spaces days), Mike Torres, posted on Windows Live Wire today with a status update for Windows Live Movie Maker.

As you may know, Windows Live Movie Maker will be a completely rebuilt replacement for the Windows Movie Maker product that has shipped with Windows since Windows ME (but won’t be shipping in Windows 7). It was included as an early beta with Windows Live Essentials, but as Torres admits:

People were surprised (or shocked, rather!) at the limited number of transitions, effects, and overall functionality in the program. We wanted to release the beta to start the conversation about the use of the ribbon and some of the overall changes to the software model, but in hindsight, the application just wasn’t useful enough for that.

While there’s no timeline for when we’ll see an updated version of WLMM (except for “this year”), Torres offers some glimpses of what to expect from a new version, including more rich-editing capabilities (more transitions, trim, split, multiple soundtracks are all feedback requests), “some sort of a timeline”, and a simple interface that would “(a)llow more experienced people to go deeper when they need to”.

What won’t be available in v1 is support for Windows XP, as Windows Live Movie Maker is built on the new graphics capabilities in Vista and 7, including DirectX.

Windows Live Movie Maker starts from scratch, plans big

Kip Kniskern — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 06:22:52 GMT

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.

Wave 3: Windows Live Movie Maker Beta

John OBrien — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 01:48:00 GMT

Making its first appearance in the Windows Live suite, Movie Maker Beta is a solid new application lacking in basic features to make it actually useful.

I’m a huge fan Windows Movie Maker in Vista because it offers a simple application with just the features needed to make/edit videos from clips, images and audio. Windows Live Movie Maker Beta does not include many of what I consider to be essential features. What it is however is the promise of something better, a new application that can offer all of the great features of the past with additional service integration and plug-in architecture for the future.

Lets look at what features it currently does have, what features from Vista’s “Windows Movie Maker” it is missing and what the future could hold.

Features

The first striking feature is the ribbon UI. First launched for Office 2007 the ribbon promotes ease of finding features. Hot on the heals of images showing that Windows Paint will get a ribbon in Windows 7, it becomes clear we will be seeing more of this in the future. The application is purposeful and straight forward. You add videos and/or photos and their thumbnails are generated and shown in the order they will be played, simply drag and drop to change this order. Add a single sound track to be played in the background.

The Visual Effects tab and functionality feels very much like the framework has been created but the actual effects and transitions either haven’t been ported or that there was not enough time to get them in, or perhaps they are waiting to hear what effects and transitions we want to be included? Currently there is a single transition, cross fade, and two effects, black & white and Sepia tone.

Output options are either a non-configurable WMV file or uploaded to MSN Soapbox.

The application worked flawlessly for me, although I had to remove my soundtrack as Soapbox determined I was breaching copyright using the sample music from Vista.

So What’s Missing?

I’m setting Vista’s Windows Movie Maker as the benchmark, lets point out some of the feature from it missing in the Windows Live Beta. Below is an image from Vista:

No timeline. You can order the objects, but no visual timeline
No editing clips. Cropping a video clip and splitting it into multiple parts is essential.
No text overlays.
Limited effects.
Limited transitions.
No Narrate timeline.
Audio mixing is not implemented.
Limited output formats, configurations.
Limited to the Soapbox service only.

This is only a Beta, what is the future?

Clearly we are not seeing a finished product here, we have the chance to preview what could be an amazing application and provide feedback.

Amazing? This application seems to lack even basic functionality of video editing software from 10 years ago, what is so amazing?

The application is bundled in the same suite as Windows Live Writer, an application that lets developers plug-in many pieces of functionality at many stages of the process pipeline. It is already clear from the menu that plug-ins can be developed for publishing to web based services. But will we also see a plug in model for effects, transitions, post processing, and additional features? These could range from a watermark filter to complex vision research techniques to remove people from video, or provide stabilisation using object recognition. Could this be the start of an amazing application platform for consumer video editing?

Whatever is in store for us Windows Live Movie Maker is the future, just not something particular useful today in Beta form.

If you’re interested in my test video you can find Buddy on Soapbox, a special thanks to Buddy for being such a great model :)

Buddy in WL Movie Maker

Feel free to ask any questions or post any features I may have missed or you would like to see in a final release.

Read more LiveSide reviews on the new Windows Live betas:

Wave 3: Windows Live Mail - Calendar, Calendar, Calendar (and more)

Wave 3: Windows Live Writer – A First Look

Wave 3- Windows Live Messenger 9 Beta – What’s New- A Comparison With 8.5

Wave 3: Windows Live Photo Gallery – New Features

Back up and running

Kip Kniskern — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 08:41:10 GMT

Apologies for the downtime, we’ve been down the last 17 hours or so, due to problems at our webhost. Pretty frustrating, really, and we’re exploring our options (know a good web host? – leave a comment). Glad to be back up, though. Apparently the rumor mill was swirling in our absence, although other than propping up Yahoo!s stock, there seems to be little news of substance, at least not yet.

Sorry, too, to have missed a nice mention by Todd Bishop of the Seattle PI, to whom Bill Gates confirmed Windows Movie Maker “as a part of Windows Live” and linked our reporting of that news here back on March 27. Watching some of the retrospectives we realized how much we’re going to miss Bill Gates, but at the same time can’t wait to see where Ray Ozzie takes Microsoft, and Windows Live.

Hopefully, we’ll remain online (with what we pay for our server we should never go down, but hey), but if not, there’s always Twitter:

Live Maps with Steve Lombardi: Part 1 – Explore Collections and Mapcruncher

Kip Kniskern — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 14:41:00 GMT

The newest release of Live Maps last week introduced some pretty cool new features, and we thought it would be fun to have Steve Lombardi, a Program Manager for Live Maps, take us on a little tour. In this first part, Steve explains two new additions, Explore Collections and MapCruncher.

Just a note on the video: I’ve been thinking about making a move from audio interviews to video, and found a little camera I really like, the Sanyo Xacti CG6. It is very small, almost as small as my phone, very easy to use, and didn’t cost much at all. For these interviews (my first ones) I just set up a little tripod and pointed it at the laptop screen, so it’s more like a screencast. Not much sophisticated videography here, yet. I also wanted to try using Windows Movie Maker (in anticipation of Windows Live Movie Maker, mentions of which are floating around on the interwebs, if you know where to look, and of course we do) and MSN Soapbox, so I built a simple title screen and added a couple of transitions, which was easy and straightforward. After a few fits and starts involving codecs (the Sanyo shoots in .mp4), and a lot of processing time, we have our first LiveSide video. Soapbox only allows 100mb files, and so I compressed this one down (a bit too much). The picture quality is quite good in the original, but I think you get the idea of what Steve is talking about, and we’ll get the processing down once I get the hang of it.

So it’s a bit rough around the edges, but I’m excited to be able to add video capabilities to our LiveSide interviews, and we’ll learn as we go.

Live Maps Part One of Three - MSN Video

Some links:

Steve’s MapCruncher collection

The Live Maps / Virtual Earth blog

Download MapCruncher

In part 2, we’ll take a look at some new 3D features, including how to make high definition movies with Live Maps 3D. I can’t tell you what Part 3 is yet, but I can tell you it’s very cool :)

Getting ready for Windows Live Wave 3

Chris — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 04:03:01 GMT

With Wave 2 now well behind us, the focus of our writing is now moving onto the next set of Windows Live products - Wave 3. Kip has already talked about how Windows 7 will see a number of programs being removed from the core operating system, notably Photo Gallery, Mail and Movie Maker.

Only the last of these is not yet available as part of the Windows Live Suite, but that should change in the near future as Microsoft readies Windows Live Movie Maker (Codename Sundance). We certainly expect to see upgrades to most if not all of the other Windows Live products currently included in the Suite, as well as the much-rumoured Windows Live Groups. We've even heard that Favourites may be on the receiving end too :)

Then there has been the talk this week of the new Microsoft Value Box (Codename Albany), that makes Microsoft's current software + services approach available to home users from off-the-shelf. Office and Office Live Workspaces will combine with Windows Live OneCare 2.5, though the Windows Live Suite is also rumoured to be making an appearance as a bunclled program too. The only potential downside to this being included is the seemingly inevitable conclusion that Microsoft is going to start charging users for the Windows Live services they currently get for free (which they won't). Lets hope the PR champions are ready to take this challenge on.

And then there is the service that underpins all of the above, Windows Live ID. This appears due for an upgrade to v5.5 in the near future, with the new Delegated Authentication website already using the new version. WL ID has made great improvements in the last few releases, notably with Linked Live IDs and the new developer SDKs - it'll be good to see what else they have up their sleeves.

(To recap, consent.live.com allows users to manage the websites that have access to their information and contacts, and if they so wish, to remove this access. This is particularly relevant in light of the Microsoft + social networks sharing contact information announcement this week.)