Story Remix and the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update: The real story

Microsoft’s new Story Remix experience in Windows 10 is one of the headline features of the upcoming Fall Creators Update for the operating system. The update is shipping next month, on the 17th of October to be exact. It brings lots of minor updates throughout the operating system, along with a touch of a new design language called the Fluent Design system. Two other headline features of the Fall Creators Update — the new Windows Timeline experience and Cloud Clipboard — won’t be making the cut for the Fall Creators Update release.

It was also recently reported that the new Story Remix experience’s main cool feature — the special effects — won’t be making the cut either and there’s been some confusion around what exactly is happening with Story Remix. Well, the good news is that Story Remix will be shipped with the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update as expected. But more importantly, the special effects feature will arrive sometime soon for Windows Insiders part of Skip Ahead — and it will also be available on the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update when it ships in October, according to a Microsoft spokesperson. It isn’t clear whether Redmond is planning to ship the feature as a regular app update for the Microsoft Photos app in Windows 10, or if it will be included out of the box with the update. At least for now, anyway.

I was actually able to try out the new special effects (all 57 of them) in Story Remix today and it they work really nicely for the most part. The experience is a bit buggy and lacks a bit of stability as it’s probably still under development, but the core features work just fine. The special effects are also really cool, and the automatic tracking feature (“Attach to a point”) also works amazingly well:

So this is kinda cool. pic.twitter.com/0FOH6tLI7S

— mehedi (@mehedih_) September 10, 2017

I’d still prefer if it Microsoft just made a modern Movie Maker that could compete with Apple’s iMovie, though. Story Remix is pretty cool, but a modern Movie Maker for simple video editing (and some of the Story Remix) features would have been perfect for a lot of users.

But yes — Story Remix, and all of its special effects will be shipping with the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update. And if everything goes according to Microsoft’s plans, that shouldn’t change.