The full changelog for Movie Maker 8.1 in recent months is:
- 4K and 2K video editing and encoding
- 100% revritten Instagram encoder and uploader
- Squared (1:1) encoding formats
- Audio waveform and play in trim/crop/split
- Upload video to YouTube
- Download video/mp3 from YouTube
- Image duration up to 33ms
- Custom camera with manual focus, exposure and white balance
- Added squared format to video encoder
- Instagram plugin: automatically squares video
Quite a major new version then. As you can see from the screenshots below, the interface is denser than Microsoft's Movie Creator, but then there are more functions on offer, including the all important ability to put 'transitions' between clips.
From left to right, adding a transition at the start of a clip/image; the main UI, about to dive into 'Image Edit'; setting the duration, Ken Burns effect and any filter on an item - note that the pan and zoom isn't customisable though, unlike the good UI for this in Microsoft's Movie Creator.
Pretty impressive stuff on a phone UI, but do note that anything intensive like adding a transition or applying a filter can be slow - even on my Snapdragon 800-powered Lumia 930, adding anything advanced meant waiting up to a minute while a percentage indicator crept up to 100%. Video editing and smartphone processors don't really go together well!