Movie Creator Beta for Lumia Phones and Surface Tablets

This week, Microsoft updated Movie Creator Beta for both Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8.1, adding a number of useful new features, including OneDrive integration and support for 4K video. However, this useful app continues to be limited to Microsoft’s Lumia handsets and Surface tablets for some reason.

Note: I’d be surprised if Microsoft continued to limit the availability of its former Nokia-based mobile apps to its own devices. But here we are in early 2015 and they’re still doing it.

If you’re not familiar with this app, Movie Creator Beta is a mobile app replacement of sorts for Movie Maker on PCs, though it is of course streamlined and designed to take a collection of personal photos (including living images created in Lumia Camera), home movies and cinegraphs (created with Lumia Cinegraph), and transform them into a cohesive, sharable production with themes, titles, filters, pan and zoom effects, transitions and background music.

Movie Creator Beta first debuted in November 2014. It’s considered a universal app since it runs on both “big” Windows and Windows Phone (though, again, limited for some reason to Microsoft’s own devices). And it actually works pretty great, even given the limited on-screen real estate found on many Lumia devices.

With this week’s update, Movie Creator Beta gets even better. New features in the Windows Phone version include:

OneDrive integration. You can now select photos and videos from OneDrive, and not just from your device.

Support for 4K video input. On supported device models (high-end Lumias like the Lumia 930, Icon, and 1520), you can now import 4K video, though output is limited to 1080p maximum (high resolution) as before. (There are other quality options too, and you can choose from a wide variety of exact resolutions if you wish.)

Change video speed. You can specify the speed (FPS) of the output video up to 30 FPS (from a default of 24).

Title and caption customization. Now, you can change the caption and title font family, size, and position.

Miscellaneous bug fixes.

The update for Windows 8.1/Surface is a lot less dramatic, but it already supported the key features found in the Windows Phone update. Microsoft says only that it received “minor improvements.”

Again, it’s only a shame that this app isn’t available to all Windows and Windows Phone users.

You can download Movie Creator Beta for Surface Tablets from the Windows Store. For some reason, this app is not currently available on Surface Pro 3.

You can download Movie Creator Beta for Lumia handsets from the Windows Phone Store.