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Windows Live Essentials Review: Movie Maker

I’ve always liked Windows Movie Maker – a simple video editing application that was bundled with Windows XP, and at the time, very impressive. In the 5 year gap between the release of XP and Vista however, Windows Movie Maker started to show its age, and it’s re-appeared on the scene with Windows Live Essentials. If you’re using Windows XP, you won’t be able to download Movie Maker as part of the Live Essentials package – you need to be running either Windows Vista or Windows 7.

Previous versions of Movie Maker were very focused on movie making and only movie making (hence the name…) but the first thing I noticed is that there seems to be a shift in focus in the creation of Live Movie Maker. Most of the editing tools found in the older version of Movie Maker have been brought forward to the Live version and been given a face lift in the process. As with all the Windows Live Essentials applications from Microsoft, navigation is handled with the ‘Ribbon’ interface, which is much simpler than the GUI found in the old Movie Maker – everything seems much more organised and features are easier to find. When you’re in Movie Maker, you’ll find everything in 4 tabs.

Windows Live Essentials Review: Photo Gallery

Windows Live Photo Gallery is Microsoft’s photo editing application that comes as part of the Windows Live Essentials download and I must admit that I really like it. It features everything that the average consumer needs, covering everything from tagging someone on a photo to basic editing features such as red eye removal. What I like about Photo Gallery is the fact that it doesn’t try to be Photoshop, it’s good as a basic photo management application, and doesn’t overly complicate things – you don’t need to be a professional photographer to find your way around or make your photos look great.

When you view a folder of photos, they’re presented in a grid view, with a slider adjusting the size of the thumbnail previews. You can view your pictures in a few different ways, as you’d expect from any decent photo management application. Photos can be viewed by folder, the date that it was taken or by person, using the “People Tags” feature which I’ll come to in a bit… The pictures in your library can also be rotated clockwise or anti-clockwise and you can even export selected photos, either to a DVD or Live Movie Maker.