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WL Movie Maker 2011 pairs up with Photo Gallery 2011 in a couple of ways: in addition to its ability to convert WLPG 2011 slide shows into movies, Movie Maker creates videos you can tag and organize with Photo Gallery. However, even if you never take a digital photo, you’ll still appreciate the new video import and editing chops in Movie Maker. You can now import webcam video directly into MM.
And, regardless of where your video comes from, MM 2011 features plenty of new ways to manipulate it. The Speed option in the Edit tab lets you vary the speed of a video clip from a dreamy 0.25x slow motion to a frenetic 64x fast motion. Spilt and trim tools are now easier to use, and you can fade audio in and out at three different speeds.
The Visual Effects tab provides options to adjust brightness, change color, and add a large variety of special effects to your video clips (edge detection is shown in this example). The real-time preview means you can see how each effect changes the video immediately.
The Animations tab now provides timing options for effects such as fade-in, fade-out, and other types of dissolves, and you can now add the same effect between all clips with a single mouse click. To see the effects applied to any clip, hover your mouse over it.
The Home tab now offers captions as well as credits and title slides. Captions can use any installed font and feature adjustable transparency levels. Preconfigured credits templates make it easy to add acting, directing, and other types of credits.
When it’s time to output your creation, MM 2011 lets you choose from an expanded roster of standard settings for PC, DVD, or mobile playback, or you can create custom settings.
You can also publish your movies to Facebook, YouTube, Windows Live SkyDrive, or Windows Live Spaces.
Windows Live Mail 2011 not only features the near-ubiquitous ribbon menu, but also puts the formerly-hidden Calendar (which integrates with Windows Live Calendar) on top. In addition to making working with the calendar simpler, WLM 2011 also provides powerful tools for working with email and stopping junk mail.
If you’re tired of dredging up help files from your email provider to figure out your email server’s name, port numbers and so on, here’s good news: WLM 2011 auto-configures email account settings for you when you set up a new account. And, when you read your email, WLM 2011 now uses conversation threading as the default, or you can choose other sort options such as priority, size, attachment, flag, watched items, and more.
WLM 2011 supports photo email, a new way to email photos that stores the full size versions in the sender’s Windows Live SkyDrive shared storage while sending reduced-size thumbnail links to the recipient. If the recipient wants to download the full-size versions from SkyDrive, there’s a 90-day window in which to do it. Choose from a variety of formats to make your photo email even more eye-catching while relieving the strain on your recipient’s inbox.
Other new and improved features include the ability to set the default encoding used for email messages (Encoding), enhanced junk mail filtering with options to block specified top-level domains and encodings, and offline calendar and email support.
WLM 2011 continues to include RSS news feed, newsgroup, and contact management with improved layout options to make using each type of content easier to use. WLM 2011 also supports launching Windows Live Writer and Windows Live Messenger directly from its interface.
Comments are closed on this article
Fecal Face
January 21, 2011 at 2:36pm
Hmm, looks like you have 69760 unread emails. Might want to get on that ;P
BAMT
July 22, 2010 at 11:39am
@stradric
But isn't it quicker to hit alt+x then the hotkey of the menu item than it is to click? That's how I work, anyway.
And yes, I know the obviousness that is the control hotkeys still working. I like alt combinations, too.
Edit: Jeeze, why doesn't my comment go where it should? It must be because I'm a minority with Opera on Linux.
michaelh
July 22, 2010 at 8:28am
If some users like the Ribbon, why not have both? The same selections are available via icons or menus, would a GUI choice be so difficult? I use the suite regularly though not at length and I've adapted just fine to some of the one-click operations. There are too many previously simple operations that now require burrowing into sub-menus. When their headers were straightforward I could navigate to what I needed, now I've got to put myself in a WYSIWYG devotee's mindset.
It's like the Win 7 default Start menu operation. The recently-used applications list slows me down and requires an extra click to get to what I want. I don't have anything against interface streamlining - great options for those that don't need more - just give us choices that doesn't require user mods or registry hacks.
The Live Essentials suite seems to promote more of the same philosophy. The backbone options are too well hidden for my tastes.
fociwm
July 22, 2010 at 7:59am
Unlike other people, I like ribbon. Why? Because I didn't really get used to menu even after about 10 years of using office suite. It was difficult to find what I wanted. On the other hand, ribbon was very intuitive, and therefore easy to understand. Now I use several new functions just because I found them in ribbon.
As you may blame, I'm not a power user. But I'm just a steady user. And with ribbon, I am able to use the word and powerpoint much more powerfully and more efficiently. I have to admit I was too lazy to learn and practice Word and Powerpoint. But it was just enough with menus during those 10 years. Now I'm doing my job much better. So except for power users who spent a lot of time in learning the office, ribbon was definitely improvement.
stradric
July 22, 2010 at 6:58am
With Live Essentials comes the 'Windows Live Sign-In Assistant'. This service is now famous for breaking SMB file shares on many applications as well as media devices like the WDTV. With the WDTV, you'll get "Invalid login" trying to browse the file share until you uninstall Live Essentials. It's a deal-breaker for me. I stay away from Live Essentials now.
You can actually install Movie Maker alone and not get the Sign-In assistant. But if you install Live Sync for example, you will get it and you'll need to remove the whole Live Essentials package in order to get functioning SMB shares again.
It's a shame too because the Sign-In assistant means that I don't have to sign into Live enabled websites.
wk
July 22, 2010 at 5:14am
I just have one question, who think ribbon is an improvement? I use MS office at work, and desbite the great improvement in 2007 version, the most irritating thing is ribbons, what is wrong with menu bar in 2003 version, it was organized, and you can find whatever you want in an easy and fast way.
Ribbon is just more aesthetic and that is it.
and YES you can not call ribbon an improvement.
stradric
July 22, 2010 at 7:07am
The ribbon is not just for aesthetics. It improves efficiency. Many oft-performed actions will become 1-click operations rather than multiple clicks with the old menu bar. I find it very convenient in many situations.
Many people don't like the ribbon bar because they are slow to adapt to change. It took them a long time to get used to the menu and when they finally did, Microsoft improved it with the ribbon bar. But people don't see it as an improvement. They only see it as a step back to learning something new. But that's technology for you. It's always changing.
I agree with Microsoft on imposing the change. Had our government had the same amount of courage, we might actually be using the far superior metric system in the US.
