Windows Essentials 2012 Release Notes

Windows Movie Maker and Windows Photo Gallery must be installed together because they share many features.

If you have an earlier edition of either Movie Maker or Photo Gallery installed on your PC, you'll have both programs installed after you upgrade to the new editions.

Movie Maker can't start if it's installed on an edition of Windows 7 or Windows 8 that doesn't include Windows Media Player. Go to the Get Windows Media Player webpage to get Windows 7 with Windows Media Player. To resolve this issue for a Windows 8 N Edition operating system, go to the Microsoft Download Center to install the Media Feature Pack for all Windows 8 N and KN editions.

Movie Maker makes extensive use of your video card's GPU (graphics processing unit). PCs with video cards not intended for high-end graphics usage or older cards might encounter problems rendering video and effects in Movie Maker. To resolve this issue, update your graphics driver. Run Windows Update and see if there are any updated drivers before continuing. If there aren't any updates and you're still having problems, try installing drivers directly from NVIDIA, Intel, or ATI/AMD:

• NVIDIA publically released drivers

• ATI/AMD publicly released drivers

• Intel publicly released drivers

  On Windows 7, video cards without DirectX 10 capabilities or higher are currently not supported and Movie Maker won't run.

  On Windows 8, performance might be limited on graphics hardware without dedicated drivers (i.e., adapters appearing as the Microsoft Basic Display Adapter).

If you speed up video beyond a factor of 4, audio is automatically muted.

Previous custom settings for saving movies (Windows Live Movie Maker 2011 or earlier .prx custom settings) aren't compatible with Windows Movie Maker 2012 and will need to be recreated.

• The video stabilization feature is only available on Windows 8.

• The Prepare files for saving option in the Options dialog is only available on Windows 8.

• The Burn to DVD option is only available on Windows 7. It will only appear if Windows DVD Maker is installed.

MPEG-2 format video isn't supported by default on Windows 8. It is supported in Windows 8 Pro with Windows Media Center. If you're running Windows 8 and you want to use MPEG-2 format videos, you should upgrade to Windows 8 Pro with Windows Media Center, or install a third-party MPEG-2 video decoder solution.

MPEG-2 format video isn't supported by default on Windows Server 2012. If you're running Windows 8 or Windows Server 2012 and you want to use MPEG-2 format videos, you should install a third-party MPEG-2 video decoder solution.