Dean Rowe's WebLog : Movie Maker

Cool mention of Windows Vista Movie Maker and DVD Maker

deanro — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 11:19:19 GMT

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2193575,00.asp

Yes I know it's a little gratuitous :-), but I got forwarded this link today and it is very cool to see someone that is really happy using the products you worked on.

Also, I know I need to start writing some more posts here and try to add some content instead of links to content :-).

Some things that are currently going on:

Just starting to work on the what the object model for Expression Encoder will look like.

I recently got a new laptop which is a tablet (Lenovo X61T). The handwriting recognition in Vista is awesome (I'm writing this with the pen), and the battery life is superb.

My wife is due to give birth to our daughter in about a week. So maybe if the baby keeps us up all night, I'll write some posts then :-)

RAW Support

deanro — Thu, 31 May 2007 08:02:46 GMT

I'm not sure how well known this is, but we did work in Windows Movie Maker and Windows DVD Maker to use the Windows Imaging Component (WIC) to make sure we supported images in the camera's RAW format.

I know some folks like to shoot photos in the RAW format and previously you would have to convert those files to JPG or something similar if you wanted to use them in Windows Movie Maker.

Well in Vista, if you've imported some RAW photos into your Photo gallery it will now give you the option to download the codec to support those files (every camera has it's own RAW format). I know the codec for Nikon camera's has been out for a while and Canon's was released not so long ago and there are probably other cameras supported too.

Once you've done that, you'll be able to view the photos in Photo Gallery and if you import them into Windows Movie Maker or Windows DVD Maker they will know how to use the photos directly as well.

Moved teams

deanro — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 08:07:48 GMT

I've been meaning to write this post for a while. For those that don't know I recently left the Video Memories Group to go and work on the Expression Media team.

It was way back in 1999, that I left the Visual C++ libraries team to go and work in a new group that was going to do something with video. In those days we weren't even sure what kind of application we wanted to build and we certainly hadn't started using the name Windows Movie Maker (we started calling our first prototype Mediapad).

A lot has happened since those early days, from the first version of Windows Movie Maker that we shipped in Windows ME, to the latest versions of Windows Movie Maker and Windows DVD Maker that are now in Windows Vista. I'm very proud of all the work that everyone on the team has accomplished over that time.

However 7 years or so is a pretty long time to be on a single team at Microsoft so after finishing Vista I felt it was a good time to have a little change in direction. I'm still in contact with my old teammates and I'm looking forward to trying out all the new stuff they come out with in the future. I also certainly won't be forgetting about Windows Movie Maker and DVD Maker as I still use them myself and you can expect me to write future posts about their features.

So now I'm on the Expressions team, specifically working on Expression Media Encoder. There aren't that many details released about the application yet, but we should be releasing more details at MIX07. In the meantime James Clarke (a most excellent PM on our team) mentioned a few details in this post, however there have been quite a few improvements in the application since then. Lots more to come ...

Helping Chris Pirillo

deanro — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 10:14:40 GMT

I managed to come across Chris Pirillo's post where he said he was breaking up with Vista. Well his number 2 reason was that Windows Movie Maker crashes on a regular basis. Well I couldn't let that statement go without saying something :-), so I posted a comment offering help.

Chris replied and with some more information from Chris and by utilizing the Watson crash reporting service I managed to track down the crashes to some third party codecs which were installed.

I'm not sure if he ended up uninstalling the codecs or disabling them with the compatibility tab, but he reported that Movie Maker is now working fine.

So although he has other reasons, I'm happy to report that number 2 is no longer one of them :-)

Windows Movie Maker and Windows DVD Maker SDK Released

deanro — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 06:21:27 GMT

Looks like we've now got the Windows Movie Maker and Windows DVD Maker SDK available on microsoft.com.

Link

You can now create custom transitions and effects for Vista Movie Maker and your own custom DVD menu styles all using the power of the GPU.

New Camcorders

deanro — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 08:17:10 GMT

A colleague from the Movie Maker team recently sent an email with the following list of Camcorders that were talked about at CES 2007.

Sony (16 new camcorders):

HDV: 2 (HDR-HC5/7)

AVCHD: 2 (HDR-UX5/7)

HDD: 5 (DCR-SR42/62/82, DCR-SR200/300)

DVD: 4 (DCR-DVD108/308/408/508)

miniDV: 3 (DCR-HC28/38/48)

Canon (7 new camcorders):

DVD: 4 (DC210/220/230, D50)

miniDV: 3 (ZR800/830/850)

Panasonic (8 new camcorders):

AVCHD: 2 (HDC-SD1/DX1)

miniDV: 3 (PV-GS80/85/320)

DVD: 1 (VDR-D310)

HDD/Flash Hybrid: 2 (SDR-H20/H200)

JVC (7 new camcorders):

HDD HD: 1 (GZ-HD7)

HDD/Flash Hybrid: 4 (GZ-MG130/155/255/555)

miniDV: 2 (GR-D750/796)

Samsung (7 new camcorders):

Flash HD: 1 (SC-HMX10)

Flash SD: 2 (SC-X300/300L)

miniDV: 1 (SC-D372)

DVD: 2 (SC-D173/575)

DVD/Flash Hybrid: 1 (SC-DX10)

Hitachi (4 new camcorders):

DVD/HDD Hybrid: 2 (DZ-HS300A/500A)

DVD: 2 (DZ-GX5020A/5080A)

Sanyo (1 new camcorder):

Flash HD: 1 (VPC-HD2)

So if you take a quick glance at these camcorders you'll see there are 2 HDV and 12 miniDV camcorders. So out of 50 camcorders, 72% won't actually need to use the Video Capture Wizard (as they don't use tape).

To this I say - fantastic :-).

One of the nice advantages of working on the Movie Maker team is that you get the opportunity to borrow various camcorders. So over the years I've shot tapes in PAL standard definition, NTSC standard definition, 1080i (50i) and 1080i (60i). Unfortunately I've not always captured all the footage from the tapes straight away, so over time I've managed to create an ever bulging zip-lock bag full of DV tapes (around 35). Over Christmas I finally got around to setting up a RAID array and capturing all these tapes using the capture wizard on Vista. It worked flawlessly and I didn't run into any issues, it just took a loooonnng time. Whenever I get around to buying a camcorder I can guarantee that it won't contain a tape :-)

Windows DVD Maker and Aspect Ratios

deanro — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 10:22:00 GMT

You may have noticed an innocent little setting in the options dialog called DVD aspect ratio. It allows you a single choice between 4:3 and 16:9.

You might think this will cause everything on the disc to be rendered as 4:3 or 16:9. However, as you may be aware, DVD’s allow a mixture of aspect ratios on a single disc. You can see this frequently on Hollywood discs where the main feature will be 16:9 and some of the extras may be 4:3.

We wanted DVD Maker to support generating DVD’s like these, so you can freely mix content of different aspect ratios on the same disc. When you add a video we will automatic detect its aspect ratio and render them appropriately either as 16:9 on the disc or as 4:3.

For DVD Menus, we will automatically generate them as 16:9 but we also specify the information so they can be rendered as 4:3 on a 4:3 display. This way the user doesn’t have to specify anything and they’ll get the desired behaviour of a menu that fills the screen. So for example if you have a 4:3 TV you should see a menu something like this.

and if you have a widescreen display you’ll see a menu something like this.

So if we do this stuff automatically, what does the setting in the option dialog do? Well for slideshows we can’t really determine the aspect ratio automatically, as images aren’t normally all 4:3 or all 16:9 so for slideshows we will use this setting and generate them as either 4:3 or 16:9, depending upon what you choose.

Windows Movie Maker project files gave us a little dilemma. Movie Maker for Windows XP and earlier doesn’t store the aspect ratio in the project file. Movie Maker uses a global option based upon the settings in its “Options” dialog. So when you add a Movie Maker project file to Windows DVD Maker we faced a choice, we could either use the current aspect ratio settings in the Movie Maker options dialog or use the settings in the DVD Maker options dialog. None of these choices were ideal, Movie Maker’s options may have changed since the project was saved and DVD Maker’s options might be different to the options in Movie Maker when the user created and edited their project.

To work around this problem, we changed Movie Maker in Vista so that it now stores the aspect ratio in the project file. This way every time you load a project in Movie Maker it will automatically switch to the aspect ratio that was being used when the project was saved. When you add the project to DVD Maker then DVD Maker will also use that aspect ratio. We can now be sure of using the correct aspect ratio and you can even add multiple Movie Maker project files with different aspect ratios and we’ll use the correct one for each. You can see this below where I added two project files, one that was created as 16:9 and one that was created as 4:3.

So this just leaves Movie Maker project files that were created in Windows XP or earlier which don’t hold the aspect ratio, so for those we’ll just default to the aspect ratio specified in DVD Maker's options dialog.

So to summarize, the aspect ratio setting within DVD Maker is mainly just used for slideshows and we’ll pretty much handle everything else automatically. So if you’re creating a slideshow and you know you’re mainly going to play back your DVD on widescreen displays choose 16:9, otherwise choose 4:3.

British pensioner becomes star on YouTube

deanro — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 07:36:00 GMT

I just love this story. He also happens to use Movie Maker for his videos which is always nice to see.

http://news.com.com/British+pensioner+becomes+YouTube+star/2100-1025_3-6105018.html

http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=geriatric1927

Vista Beta 2

deanro — Wed, 24 May 2006 04:37:00 GMT

Today, we announced the release of Vista Beta 2. It’s very cool to know that the new versions of Movie Maker and especially Windows DVD Maker are suddenly going to be in a lot of people’s hands. Personally I’m very much looking forward to seeing the feedback as it rolls in.

I’m now running Vista Beta 2 on my home machines along with Beta 2 of Office 2007 and I’d have to say it’s working pretty darn well. It’s very nice to use and I just can’t imagine going back to Windows XP now.

New Windows Vista Team Blog

deanro — Fri, 28 Apr 2006 02:08:00 GMT

The Windows Vista team blog was recently launched and includes posts from Lorrin Maughan who is a Product Manager with the Windows Client Marketing organization which covers Windows Movie Maker and Windows DVD Maker. There is one post about the Windows Photo Gallery but expects more posts about Movie Maker and DVD Maker in the future.

Goodbye capture, hello file copy

deanro — Mon, 27 Feb 2006 08:37:00 GMT

Well maybe not quite yet, but there are more and more cameras coming out that no longer use tape. They record the video onto a little memory card or hard drive. With the ones that contain a memory card you just pop the memory card out of the camera, put it in your card reader and copy the video files across just like your digital still camera.

When these video cameras first started to appear the video quality was a little lacking but they’ve been getting better every day and Sanyo are now coming out with a high-definition (720P) version (pictured below).

One of the fun aspects of working on the Movie Maker team is that quite often we get a chance to try out new video cameras. I recently took one of the Sanyo standard definition cameras out for a spin. It recorded at 640x480 in MPEG-4 and although the quality of the video (especially in low-light situations) wasn’t the greatest, the form factor of the device was just amazing. I took it to a couple of meeting and as soon as people saw it they wanted to pick it up and try it out. I found myself taking little bits of video here and there that I wouldn’t have normally taken because it was just so easy and I could copy the file across to my computer in seconds.

One of the arguments I hear from people about these cameras is that you don’t have a tape which you can keep on the shelf as a backup of a video. I understand the argument but I don’t think it’s an overriding concerning, at least not for me. You have the same issue with digital photos and I suspect most people don’t print out all their digital photos as backup. It just raises the importance of ensuring you have good backups of our computer data. Fortunately Windows Vista has a new Windows Backup feature, that I’m looking forward to trying out.

What do you think? Do you always see yourself using video tapes for the foreseeable future or are you feeling the lure of these new devices?

Windows Movie Maker on Vista

deanro — Thu, 16 Feb 2006 08:04:00 GMT

We're releasing more details about Windows Movie Maker on Vista. Check out the following link for a few more details.

Link

One of the most exciting features (besides the fact that you can now use Windows DVD Maker to publish your MovieMaker projects directly to DVD), is that we now take advantage of the graphics processor on your video card. This means that you're no longer limited to the 320 x 240 preview that we currently have in MovieMaker on Windows XP.

More blogs from the Movie Maker Team?

deanro — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 09:01:00 GMT

Well it looks like some others on the team are starting to think about blogging. There may even be a team blog in the future.

Link

Medipad

deanro — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 09:37:00 GMT

Thought some of you might be interested in an extremely early shot of "MediaPad", before it came Windows Movie Maker. Well here it is. At this early stage we were just basically experimenting with some UI bits and pieces. Fortunately we have program managers and UI designers that help us to keep things sensible and functional.

And Windows Movie Maker was called?

deanro — Fri, 02 Sep 2005 08:39:00 GMT

Mediapad.

If you used notepad to edit notes, wouldn't you use Mediapad to edit media? This was just our internal name until the name Windows Movie Maker was decided upon. Frankly, I'm glad we changed the name. I'll try to see if I can dig out a screenshot of an early version.