Behind the Windows 7 Startup Animation (Channel 9)

Behind the Windows 7 Startup Animation

Posted: Dec 10, 2009 at 1:06 PM

By: Larry Larsen

(13)

89,748 Views

4 Comments

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You see it every day (or every few weeks for those of us who leave their computers on) now you can see the thinking behind the Windows 7 Startup Animation. Rolf Ebeling was new to Microsoft when he was handed the task of coming up with what you would see when your computer starts. Some significant changes were made to this part of the boot sequence compared to Vista, which brought both benefits and challenges, for instance when the animation loads there are no graphics or audio drivers loaded yet. See the progression of the startup animation and meet one of the people behind the product.

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W3bbo Work hard; increase production; prevent accidents, and be happy.

Dec 10, 2009 at 2:43 PM

Interesting story, I'm surprised at the process MS went through to develop this animation; I was expecting a story involving dozens of focus-group tests and things like that.
littleguru <3 Seattle

Dec 10, 2009 at 11:12 PM

Nice behind the scenes I love the animation!
ewalker

Dec 12, 2009 at 4:52 AM

Excellent story. Well worth the 14 minutes to follow it to the end. Thanks to @shanselman on Twitter for the link to this video.
silverbot01

Dec 12, 2009 at 2:35 PM

Interesting.

When I first saw it I didn't think it was possible to do without using some sort of graphics driver, especially considering the nice smooth animation that goes along with the loading page. I guess it is kind of nice that my PC isn't the fastest in the world since I get to see that animation at least a few times a week.

I was also interested in how it was built, and seeing that you stringed together TIFFs that were 200 by 200 I am shocked in knowing it worked so well.