I installed Windows Movie Maker in 2026 and it uses 97% less RAM than Clipchamp

Ever since Microsoft discontinued Windows Movie Maker back in 2017, I have been left adrift and wandering between heavyweight professional platforms such as DaVinci Resolve, or cloud-dependent modern alternatives such as Filmora, and Adobe Premiere.

Fortunately, Windows Movie Maker 6.0 has resurfaced thanks to the efforts of @skylerdagirl on Twitter, which provides me and others a place to do my quick edits and transitions without all the bloat of a flagship production experience or the budget-sipping leash of a cloud-enabled editor.

I didn’t expect to spend part of my afternoon downloading Windows Movie Maker 6.0 in 2026; however, I couldn’t pass up the modder’s good intention of preserving Windows history.

For anyone who remembers MTV’s TRL might remember the legendary Movie Maker software as well. Movie Maker wasn’t just an in-box utility; it was a rite of passage for most aspiring amateur videographers. Like Paint, Movie Maker was an easy identifier of a Windows user who wore it as a badge of ironic pride. A generation of Windows users who fancied themselves an amateur Spielberg or Nolan cut their teeth learning basic editing with those iconic white fonts on blue title cards, crossfade transitions, and simple timeline manipulation, thanks to Microsoft including Movie Maker for free.

The installation experience was almost jarring in its simplicity. Thanks to most modern app experiences requiring sign-in, account validations, or credit cards, I was thrown by how straightforward the download was. No account creation, no “this will be added to your Microsoft Store library.” Just the 8.8MB installer, a double-click, and I was up and running in less than 2 minutes.

Without so much as a tutorial, I knew intuitively to drop in clips, add transitions between them, and get creative with title cards to introduce or conclude my video masterpiece.

With Movie Maker 6.0 resurfacing, its appearance highlights the widening gap in modern Windows experiences that feels more like the OS is offloading much of its native experiences to 3rd party platforms.

Microsoft dumped Movie Maker, and now pushes Clipchamp

For a quick minute, Microsoft had no legitimate successor in line when it cut Movie Maker from its in-box apps suite, and I was left scrambling between getting an Adobe license, testing a bunch of open-source solutions, or jumping platforms to macOS for iMovie or Final Cut.

However, over the past few years, Microsoft has offered up Clipchamp as its reasonable, casual editing platform. While Clipchamp started as the ideal lightweight basic video editor, Microsoft has steadily added features that have also increased the platform’s number of dependencies. Unfortunately, the minute Microsoft tied its OneDrive cloud storage service to Clipchamp was the same time it stopped being a lightweight and free video editor for me.

It’s becoming apparent that Microsoft’s decision isn’t sitting well with other Windows users, who are looking for a video editor that leverages local files, local saves, and doesn’t require a sign-in or account.

Thankfully, Movie Maker 6.0 is back to deliver on all those notes of being lightweight, fast, and best yet, self-contained.

The file is small, so the download is almost instant. The modder notes that they used this smaller installer for years and uploaded it specifically to avoid losing access if the original hosting links ever vanished.

While it may feel like a bit of nostalgia and rose-tinted glasses-wearing by a super niche Windows audience to fawn over the return of Movie Maker 6.0, keep in mind millions of people regularly use iMovie for similar experiences.

iMovie and Movie Maker stemmed from similar concepts of ecosystem conveniences that fostered a no-fuss editing experience that came with Windows and macOS. Over time, Apple managed to add features, improve performance, and modernize iMovie’s interface without losing the core concept of being a quickly opened, intuitively used, and offline experience for its users.

On the other side of the fence, Microsoft chose not to evolve Movie Maker, but instead, scrapped it for Windows Live Movie Maker and eventually settled upon a cloud-linked Clipchamp experience. Unlike iMovie, which feels like a native experience because of a shared UI and UX across the board, Clipchamp feels like an add-on or intermediary between your local files and a 3rd party app experience.

To avoid sounding hyperbolic about Clipchamp, here is a features breakdown of what you get with Microsoft’s old video editor, its new solution, and even iMovie.

Once Movie Maker 6.0’s icon appeared on my desktop, I was just a double-click away from a straightforward setup wizard and a 10-second-long progress bar, away from my first retro video edit.

The iconic Windows Movie Maker remained unscathed by time and instantly recognizable to me. Instead of being met with a shadow box or click-and-follow tutorials, I was left with a basic timeline, simplistic viewing window, basic media inputs, and 49 built-in transition options.

Intuitively, I dragged clips from my media pool into the timeline that comes equipped with a designated transition slide separating your video. All of this feels just like it did in 2007.

By the time I finished my test project, I remembered why I chose to write about this news. It was a reminder of the good old days when a piece of software did the one or two things it was designed to do, and did it well without having to resort to the cloud to enable additional features, export without watermarks, or any of the myriad of subscription-based nickel-and-diming SaaS has become known for.