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/StoneyCalzoney Jun 17 '25

I swear I remember using storyteller or a similar MS-branded software back in middle school/early high school, around the early-to-mid 2010s... It was retired by that point but I had found some copy online because I needed it for a school project parodying the Sarah McLachlan pet commercials.

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u/Triabolical_ Jun 17 '25

Yes. The name escapes me, but it was written by somebody in Microsoft Research and did a really nice job.

The photos group just ignored it, for reasons, surely stupid ones.

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u/[deleted] Jun 17 '25

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u/StoneyCalzoney Jun 17 '25

(Reposted without image link because automod hates google image links)

I found it. Photo Story

What a throwback... The screenshots in Google Images are all too familiar.

Hopefully IA has a copy, if not there needs to be one...

1

u/Triabolical_ Jun 17 '25

That's it.

Storyteller did that, but with different sorts of animations, high-quality surrounding graphics, and with photos or video.