Microsoft have just released a new video which provides an overview of the forthcoming Windows Live Essentials “Wave 4” release – check it out below.  A quick rundown of key features:

• Invoke the power of dark magic and have Windows Live Photo Gallery automatically recognise faces and allow you to quickly tag your friends
• Easily retouch your photo to show the shot you want – like all the best paparazzi peeps
• Combine elements of several photos into one final photo, allowing you to create a group shot of yourself alongside Obama and Saddam Hussein
• Use Windows Live Movie Maker to create “You’ve Been Framed” style home movies no-one wants to watch, and upload to Facebook, YouTube and elsewhere
• Saturate the web with the same boring old holiday shots – upload your photos and movies to SkyDrive/Live Mesh, flickr, Facebook MySpace, YouTube and others
• Even better – bombard your mates directly with e-mail with Windows Live Mail (or your own regular e-mail client) connecting to Hotmail, GMail, Yahoo! Mail and others, so you can e-mail entire albums without actually attaching them to your message (courtesy of SkyDrive integration)
• Keep banging on about your uninteresting photos by using Windows Live Writer and blogging to Windows Live Spaces, Blogger, TypePad AND WordPress for maximum saturation
• Use Windows Live Sync to store your photos in the cloud, so you can bore people anytime, anywhere
• Are you a flash bugger with more than one PC?  Use Sync to keep your albums, er, synced over multiple computers
• Harass your entire social network by using Windows Live Messenger, which now combines multiple social sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, MySpace, LinkedIn and many others into one dashboard

Seriously, though – the free Windows Live Essentials download (not available just quite yet) is full of fantastic applications that help integrate your social networks, manage photos and videos, and sync’n’share content very easily.