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Windows Live Movie Maker

The new Windows Live Movie Maker – available today!

Today we’ve released Windows Live Movie Maker from beta as part of a refresh to our Windows Live Essentials download. Windows Live Movie Maker is the first application designed for Windows 7 and is built to make beautiful movies from your photos and videos very quickly. Download the new Windows Live Movie Maker to get an immediate (and free!) upgrade to your Windows Live experience.

Introducing the new Windows Live Movie Maker

Windows Live Movie Maker is one more example of why Windows Live Essentials are must-have applications for people using Windows. With the goal of making it easy to communicate and share with the people you care about, we’re continually updating these applications to ensure they take advantage of the best Windows has to offer. With today’s release, you will be able to see a variety of ways Windows Live Movie Maker takes advantage of Windows 7 including expanded support for HD video so you can create great looking movies using the most popular devices on the market – including your mobile phone or Flip Video camcorder.

We’ve been anticipating the official release of Windows Live Movie Maker for a while now (see our team’s previous posts here and here). As the team outlined in their posts, we’ve really taken the time to rethink what great video editing software should do. We heard your feedback and designed this version so you can quickly and easily create short movies and photo slideshows that can be shared the way that works best for you. The AutoMovie feature in Windows Live Movie Maker literally creates a polished movie out of your photos and video clips in under a minute, which means it can take less time to create a movie than it does to watch it.

According to recent research from IDC, over 60 percent of US consumers watch user-generated videos online. They also found that almost half of the videos shared on the Internet are just a few minutes long.* While video is becoming just as easy to capture as photos, it’s nowhere near as easy to edit and share. Current video editing software is complicated and can require a large time investment just to create a two-minute video you want to share on YouTube. I recently used Windows Live Movie Maker to create a movie out of 50 photos, three video clips, and a music soundtrack in 30 seconds using the AutoMovie feature in Windows Live Movie Maker. I couldn’t have done that in iMovie – it doesn’t have a feature for combining photos, videos and music in one automatic step.

We’ve heard you say that you want powerful editing tools that work quickly, so your masterpiece can go from camera to YouTube in a flash, so that’s what we built.

Here are a few reasons I think you will enjoy the new-and-improved Windows Live Movie Maker:

It’s easy to create beautiful videos. Movie Maker can create great looking movies in under a minute. Just add your photos and videos to Movie Maker, and select your music, then click the Auto Movie button. Auto Movie will knit those photos and videos together with striking effects and transitions, and even fit them to a soundtrack of your choosing. Basic movie – done. If you want to spend more time editing your video clips, adding animations, or visual effects you can, but the heavy lifting is done for you in less than a minute.
More customization features easily add polish to your movie. You told us after the beta came out that you’d like more transitions, effects, and video editing features. The new Movie Maker has more than 60 transitions, 18 pan and zoom options, and 20 visual effects that you can apply to photos or videos, plus video trim, split, and fade capabilities. As a movie maker myself, I love the range of rich editing capabilities in this version and particularly like being able to auto-preview transitions like cross-fade, dissolve, pixelate, and shatter by hovering over the effect and watching it in real time.
It’s simple to share your movie. Videos are for sharing, so Movie Maker makes it easy to share online with a few clicks. Post your video to YouTube right from the main menu, or add a quick plug-in and easily publish to Facebook. We will be adding more plug-ins to popular sharing sites in the future. You can also burn your creation to a DVD or save it in high definition to play on your TV. Save it down to a smaller format and transfer it to a mobile device or send it via e-mail.
It works great with Windows 7. With Windows 7 and Windows Live Movie Maker it’s easy to get your photos and videos off your camera and onto your PC. You’ll also get increased capabilities for creating HD movies and enjoy support for additional file formats – including QuickTime formats, AVCHD and .MPEG4. And most importantly, if you use Office or Windows already, you’ll find Movie Maker easy to navigate because it uses a similar design.

Want to see what the new Windows Live Movie Maker can do? We created a few sample movies that showcase its new transitions, effects, and editing capabilities:

Not sure where to start? Check out these videos that demonstrate how some of our favorite features work:

We’ll be posting more of these how-to videos at the bottom of this page. Keep checking back to learn new tips and tricks!

Change isn’t always easy, and I know there have been some growing pains as we’ve moved from Windows Movie Maker to Windows Live Movie Maker. I want to address one thing we think you might be concerned about – OS support. As Mike mentioned in his earlier post, in order to take advantage of the latest and greatest technologies available on the Windows platform, we optimized the new Windows Live Movie Maker for Windows Vista and Windows 7. As a result you get support for newer file formats like HD, a new graphics driver model which brings more reliable and stable support for high-end graphics, and a new engine on top of DirectX, which improves speed and enables even more advanced capabilities over time. If you’re still using Windows XP, Windows Movie Maker 2.1 for Windows XP is still a great option.

When we told you that Movie Maker was becoming part of Windows Live Essentials we said we believed that doing this would enable us to provide you with software updates more often. We’re excited to introduce the new Windows Live Movie Maker today with so many great new features because we think it delivers on that promise – we’re continually updating the Windows Live applications so you can communicate, share, and keep your life in sync. Grab some photos or video clips and give it a try!

– Brian Hall, and the Windows Live team

July 2, 2009

July; What Microsoft, Apple, Harry Potter, Bank of America, GE, and Sirius Has in Common…

For all of you guys who are following details on cars and the auto industry, for you guys who love the latest new Harry Potter movie, for you Microsoft fans and if you like GE, BAC and/or C, July is the MONTH FOR YOU! This month, there is a ton of stuff going on. So, I added this article here from Motley Fool. Check it out!

4 Dates to Circle in July (BAC, C, GE, MSFT, SIRI, TWX)

Here are a few of the days that I plan to approach with eyes wide open.

July 11
If you’re hoping for a cheap — and legal — copy of Microsoft’s (Nasdaq: MSFT) upcoming operating system, this is your last day to pre-order a copy of Windows 7 Home Premium as an upgrade for Vista and XP users for just $49. Microsoft’s promising platform will hit the market with a suggested retail price of $119 in the fall.

A lot is riding on Windows 7. Vista has been the butt of operating-system jokes, especially in Apple’s (Nasdaq: AAPL) effective “I’m a Mac” ads. Fans of Vista will argue that the knocks have been unfair, but all sides can agree that Windows 7 is Microsoft’s best chance to matter in a future that threatens to make operating systems less important in a future more focused on cloud computing.

It’s a good sign for Microsoft that the pre-orders — at least so far — have been selling briskly.

July 15
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince becomes Time Warner’s (NYSE: TWX) latest installment in the blockbuster series to hit a multiplex near you. It’s also the first theatrical release since author J.K. Rowling completed the seven-book series. Will that heighten or diminish interest in the movie series as Time Warner milks the last two books into three cinematic experiences?

Box-office receipts are trending ahead of where they were a year ago, so momentum is on Time Warner’s side. However, there’s also a busy slate of rival flicks hitting exhibitors this summer. Can Harry Potter’s spell over audiences continue?

July 17
Fridays are typically sleepy days on the news front. Few companies want to test shareholders’ mettle by delivering quarterly reports heading into the weekend. However, three meaty stocks with plenty to prove — Bank of America (NYSE: BAC), Citigroup (NYSE: C), and General Electric (NYSE: GE) — will all be stepping up to the podium on July 17.

All three stocks started out the year as Dow components, until Citigroup was booted last month. They have a few other things in common:

* They were all trading in the single digits before the March rally kicked in.
* They have all sharply slashed their dividends over the past year.
* They have more than doubled off their lows, placing even more pressure for the companies to earn their recent gains in two weeks.

July 29
The last thing that Sirius XM Radio (Nasdaq: SIRI) subscribers expect is a rate increase. The merger between Sirius and XM was based on an agreement that rates would be frozen for a couple of years.

However, that didn’t stop Sirius XM from bumping up its rates on discounted secondary receivers in the same family in March. It also began charging for online streaming, which in Sirius XM’s defense was accompanied by an upgrade in the quality of its Web-based offering.

Sirius XM is allowed to make these adjustments. It’s also entitled to pass along on any music royalty fee increases — and it will do just that when monthly rates go up by $1.98 on July 29.

That increase is going to become a huge test for the satellite-radio operator. Subscriber growth peaked during last year’s fourth quarter, when Sirius XM watched over more than 19 million receivers. It closed out the March quarter with just 18.6 million subscribers.

Will the July increase shake out even more subscribers, or will it be a cash flow dream as fans pony up for long-term commitments to lock in the current rates?

Things can cut either way, so join me in making sure you’re wide awake this month.

Technorati Tags: finance, harry potter, microsoft, apple, SIRI

January 26, 2009

Bill Gates ups his billion-dollar giving

I love this article by the editor of Fortune Magazine. Read on to see how Gates is responding to the current economic downturn. All I have to say is, You go Bill!

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There aren’t many optimists these days. Bill Gates, thank God, is one.

His assets – actually the assets of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, where the bulk of his wealth resides – are down like everybody else’s. They declined about 20% last year, he says in his first annual letter for his foundation. Still, Gates notes in the letter released today, he and his wife have decided to increase their spending to $3.8 billion this year. vs. $3.3 billion in 2008.

The need is that great. So is the Gates’ optimism. I learned about that up-close a year ago when I wrote the first profile of Melinda that’s been done with her involvement. Fortune called her “The $100 Billion Woman” on its cover because that’s how much money – theirs and their friend Warren Buffett’s (BRK.B) combined – theyll likely give away in their lifetimes.

Bill was full of hope then – and eager to trade his Microsoft (MSFT) job for full-time work at the foundation. But here’s what strikes me about his comments in today’s letter and a conference call he held this afternoon for reporters: how hopeful he is about advances in global health, where he’s spent 50% of his philanthropic dollars. In the next four to six years, he says, he expects HIV/AIDS to be “dramatically” reduced via a pill or a microbicide, which is a gel that women use to protect themselves from infection.

As he told me a year ago, Melinda helped draw him away from singly focusing on vaccine research and scientific solutions that may be decades away. “You can’t save kids just with vaccines,” as she says. Bill says in his letter that an AIDS vaccine is coming, but it’s “very likely to be more than 10 years away.”

The Gates are traveling more than ever. Melinda is in Ethiopia now. Bill is heading to Nigeria. A malaria vaccine is another big goal for him. A vaccine will go into the last phase of human trials this year, he says, and could be ready for wide use by 2014. It goads him that companies and governments have invested little in new malaria drugs simply because the disease has been eliminated in rich countries. It kills almost 1 million children per year elsewhere. So part of his new full-time work at the foundation is to egg on pharmaceutical companies that aren’t working on vaccines for the developing world. “Nobody gives them a hard time,” he told me. “That job is natural for me to do.”

The Gates’ newest passion: agriculture. They hope to bring a “Green Revolution” to Africa similar to the program that increased crop yields in Latin America and Asia beginning in the 1940s. This is high-tech and inordinately complex work – thus their lust for the challenge. But it may be easier than fixing U.S. education. In the past decade, the Gates have spent more than $2 billion on America’s public schools and it’s been a slog except for pockets of progress like New York City, where better teachers have made all the difference. Gates says in his letter that it’s “amazing how big a difference a great teacher makes versus an ineffective one…If you want your child to get the best education possible, it is actually more important to get him assigned to a great teacher than to a great school.”

While running a foundation is not like running a business (”You don’t have customers who beat you up when you get things wrong or competitors who work to take those customers away from you,” Gates says in his letter), here’s one way the two converge: Investing in the right people gives you the best shot at success. It’s a point that management guru Jim Collins, featured in the current issue of Fortune, preaches and it’s one of the many lessons Bill Gates is learning in his new calling.

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Tag: Microsoft

Tag: Microsoft

Windows Live Movie Maker… iMovie Killer? Who Knows?

July; What Microsoft, Apple, Harry Potter, Bank of America, GE, and Sirius Has in Common…

Bill Gates ups his billion-dollar giving