Microsoft Windows Video Editor

1. Microsoft Movie Maker Windows 10
2. Windows Movie Maker

There's been a five-year drought when it comes to included entry-level video editing in the last few versions of Windows. With, the drought is finally over—thanks to new capabilities in the updated Photos app. Movie Maker formerly filled this role, but Microsoft last updated it in 2012 and stopped offering it entirely as of January 2017. Though many reviled it in its early versions, it was quite effective by the end, and at least the OS provided something for basic video editing. The lack of included video-editing software gave macOS, with its appealing iMovie, a leg up on Windows. Of course, professionals and serious enthusiasts will want more, but the video capabilities in will serve, and even delight, casual users who want to create something fun from their video clips.

You can now join, trim, and rearrange clips; you can add background soundtrack music, and even apply some nifty effects and text titles. Things you don't get yet include voiceover recording, support for 360-degree video content, and much control over the export file. You do get impressive motion tracking and 3D overlay effects. Don't forget, Windows is now a service, so every so often the app will be updated with new features. Yes, Windows now has video-editing capabilities, but it still doesn’t have a standalone video-editing app, like Movie Maker. Microsoft took a different tack by including the features in the Photos app. The video tools in Photos are strong enough to stand alone as an app, and maybe we'll see a separate one someday, since users may not realize that, despite the name, it's not just for Photos.

For now, the company aims to reduce complexity by including all its multimedia editing in one app, however confusingly named. Follow through the slides below to see what you can do with the new in Windows 10 Fall Creators Update. After you select the video and tap Add, Photos goes through some processing, and then plays your automatically generated video. Note the big Remix button, which changes the style (think Instagram filters), background music, and timing. You can keep hitting the Remix button as many times as you want till you like the result. You can then share or export the creation to a video file.

But notice that you can also tap Edit Video, for more control. One quibble with the interface is that if you click away from the project, it disappears without notice.

The video editor inside the Photos app is not timeline based, but rather completely storyboard based, so you just see a thumbnail of each clip. With a clip selected, tap Trim, and you see an editing screen like this. (While we're here, note the beautiful translucency of the apps Fluent Design). As is standard, you get handles for the in and out points on the clip. Also note that Remix automatically chooses in and out points. I like that you can set a duration and move that back and forth, in case your video has tight time requirements.

As with nearly all video editors, you can stop and start play with the spacebar, and in this editing mode, only the trimmed-to part plays. You can add text to any clip in your movie, with six choices ranging from sedate to over the top, in your face. You can choose six positions/sizes, for main and secondary titling needs. It's not WYSIWYG, since you enter text in a separate text box, but your words appear on screen in the chosen style as you type. The Boom title effect shown is very cool, as it uses your video with the text as a mask. Commercial enthusiast-level editors like Premiere Elements only recently added this striking capability.

Microsoft Movie Maker Windows 10

Here's a bonus slide that isn't specific to video, but it's a feature worth highlighting in the new Fall Creators version of Photos. The previous version of Photos included no search capabilities at all (though if you synced your photos and videos to OneDrive, you got powerful search there). Now, an integrated search bar in the Photos app even uses AI to identify object types. It even has face recognition that groups photo of the same person, but you can't add a name to these as you can in Apple and Google Photos.

Windows Movie Maker

One neat idea it does enable is to create a 'face show' as Picasa used to do: You could search on one face and make a slideshow video of all the pictures found.