r/windows • u/TheCelestialDawn • Jun 12 '25

General Question What happened to Windows Movie Maker?

It's the only movie software program I needed. Now it's gone?

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u/Triabolical_ Jun 12 '25

I know the real story. I wrote the UI for DVD maker in Vista and was on the movie maker team.

DVD maker was a popular program, and the team planned a new product we named storyteller. Think of the Ken burns effect for photos but with videos, canned content, etc. A whole bunch of different themes.

Then a reorg happened and we got moved in with the picture folks under their management. Their second level manager said that the team could decide what to do, which was great, and specifically said we could proceed.

I wrote a prototype with still photos only, we tested it in the usability lab with customers, and they loved it.

Then four weeks later our manager changed his mind and told us we couldn't do storyteller and that we should do a rewrite of movie maker.

Of the ten or twelve people on the team, all but two left in a month.

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u/VictoryMotel Jun 12 '25

Why did movie maker need a rewrite?

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u/Triabolical_ Jun 12 '25

Absolutely no reason, and the resulting windows movie maker live was far less robust and feature-rich than the original.

But since almost everybody who understood the old codebase less and the pictures team though that video was just a series of pictures, they decided it would be simpler to just build a new version.

I heard through the grapevine a year later that the devs had revised their viewpoint on how hard video was.