Hey. I'm Eric Doerr and I lead the Program Management team for Digital Memories (which is our geeky way of saying anything related to Photos or Video in Windows Live).

Some of you have noticed that we introduced a new Windows Live Movie Maker product a few weeks ago as one of the betas in the latest version of the Windows Live suite of PC applications. We've been pretty quiet about this product, so you might ask "where have we been and what have we been doing?" And you might wonder, "Where are all the features?" The answers to these two questions are "working very hard," and "coming soon."

A little bit of history

Back when we introduced the first version of Windows Movie Maker (waay back in 2000, when we were all still shooting with Super 8 film and had darkrooms in our basements), who would have guessed how fast the imaging space would become accessible to the mainstream consumer? And the Internet! Who knew how dramatically it would change how we connect with our friends and family and the world?

A few years ago, we started Windows Live and took a hard look at our consumer products. Movie Maker was an established product with millions of regular users. But looking forward, we knew we had problems. The core of the product hadn't been designed with today's hardware in mind, and getting it to scale to new technologies like HD video was difficult. Although the Windows Vista version of Movie Maker brought significant improvements to performance and stability, we still heard power users give advice like "save your work often." And we also knew that although the product could do amazing things, most users barely scratched the surface of its features. Finally, our customer test showed that too many people were intimidated by the product and had a hard time getting started.

Clearly, we had to solve these problems in a sustainable way that also gave us the flexibility to respond quickly to evolving scenarios. 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.

Building a new engine

The first thing we did is build a new engine (did I mention we're geeks?) to handle more photo and video formats, bigger file sizes, and the ever-increasing mountain of photos and videos captured every day. (I thought I shot a lot of photos and videos until a coworker returned from a 3-week vacation and had taken 24,000 photos and hundreds of video clips!) We built an engine designed to scale to everything happening today, and everything we could imagine throwing at it in the future. If the old Windows Movie Maker engine was a dependable propeller plane, the new Windows Live Movie Maker is more like a jet engine.

In the current beta, you can't see much of that power, but I want to let you know that it's coming. You'll see lots of cool things become possible that you just couldn't do in Windows Movie Maker (or any other consumer product, for that matter). We're not ready to share a lot of details, but I'll give you one hint: he old Movie Maker engine was 2D. Let's just say that the new engine is better than that.

Rethinking the interface

Once we got the engine underway, we started digging in to the user interface (UI). We knew from user research and customer visits that most people didn't have the time, energy or willpower to spend hours putting together home movies. In our user segmentation, we call these users "normal humans" and the other users "people who understand what I mean when I say that it's not looking good for the character in the redshirt.*" So we started building an interface focused on the core things normal humans do. Things like having 5 minutes to spare and wanting to share a set of photos and videos from a birthday party/soccer game/night on the town with mom/family/friends. Over time, we plan to add more features that will let some customers spend more time being creative, but we will always focus on having the primary scenarios that most customers want complete in just a few clicks.

After a bunch of experimentation, we found that the "ribbon" UI paradigm worked well for the problems we were trying to solve. One way to look at this is that Office invented the "ribbon" to surface the 20 percent that people use 80 percent of the time, leaving the complicated stuff hidden until you need it. With Windows Live Movie Maker, we started by building the 20%, and we're working really hard to add the other 80 percent now. (Trust me, we're good at adding the more complicated bits.)

As an example, here's the same movie in both versions:

This is Windows Movie Maker. Does it look complicated enough for you?

This is Windows Live Movie Maker. It's way simpler.

Big changes:

• We got rid of the project workspace, the short-term parking area where for files, which you then had to drag to the storyboard or timeline.

• You always have a movie in the Movie Maker. When you open files, they are automatically in your movie. You can instantly publish or save and be done.

• We moved all the tasks to the ribbon area, instead of them being scattered on the top and side.

• We got rid of the timeline. For all its power, having common tasks (like adding a soundtrack) forced a switch from the relatively approachable storyboard to the somewhat scary timeline, which was a problem.

Number of clicks aren't everything, but just for reference, to create the movie above takes 6 clicks in Windows Live Movie Maker (add 3 if you want to publish to the web) and 11 clicks in Windows Movie Maker (and would take dozens more to publish to the web).

Embracing the web

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.

This is the first glimpse you'll get of the new Windows Live Movie Maker. It's an earlier product version, compared with the rest of the Windows Live betas, so you'll probably see the beta tag stick around a while longer. Of course we'll keep you posted as we roll out more features. We're just getting started. Stay tuned.

— Eric Doerr, PM, Movies and Photos

* I was inspired by Paul Thurrott's recent post on the beta and couldn't resist the redshirt reference. Learn what a redshirt is

UPDATE: For more info, please see our more recent blog post about Windows Live Movie Maker beta:
http://windowslivewire.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!2F7EB29B42641D59!35518.entry