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Software Review: Making Muvees

Posted by Kathleen Maher on December 15th 2009 | Comments Closed
Categories: Software Review
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Of all the tools out there that promise to make video making easy and fun, Muvee has been one of the best and one of the easiest. The way Muvee works is to let you select video clips and still pictures, add a soundtrack, and pick a style. The templates add some graphics elements, such as a scrapbook, stars, cubes, and also a style for cuts and transitions. Then you just push a button and see what you get.

The developers at Muvee have been pretty quiet and that’s because they’ve been working away re-architecting the software to take advantage of modern hardware. They’ve also added new features to Muvee Reveal to add control and at the same time keep it simple to use. They’ve also brought the templates up to date. Muvee has had the ability to highlight important areas of a video and to mark the areas you don’t want, but they’ve added more control so you can select the exact sections you want. You can add logos and captions. But, perhaps the most obvious improvement is that the software is much faster.

CEO Terence Swee came to JPR’s offices to demonstrate the software. Obviously, he can make Muvee sing and dance with just a few clicks but what’s impressive is that in our first few tries here we were able to customize our Muvees to get good results. For instance, the software has built-in face detection capabilities to zoom in on the most important areas of videos or photos. I was struck by the graceful way in which it combined a zoom in on one video clip with the zoom out on another. It’s possible to turn up the native video and turn down the music. You can also add a voice-over recording.

The Muvee developers have tried to keep the features to a minimum to be just the most valuable and useful features one might need but I did keep wishing for a little more—the ability to rotate video, to adjust the lighting, and everyone will have their own ideas and there ya go. As soon as you add what everyone wants you’ve got a heavy, difficult to use product. The emphasis here is on using as few button clicks as possible and overall the company has hit the mark.

Muvee Reveal takes advantage of Cuda to speed the software’s performance on Nvidia processors. It shows up in creating previews and also in creating output files. That’s really the great thing about the new Muvee software—because it’s faster, it’s a lot more pleasant to just try out different styles and to fine tune the content.

The only snag we came across was that Muvee didn’t seem to like Quicktime much as an import format. Everything else seemed to be fine and you never know if it’s just a problem with the components on a particular computer.

Muvee Reveal enables you to create and upload videos to the web and Muvee has an online service at shwup.com. In addition, you can upload to your account on YouTube and Facebook. You can save and export to your iPhone and the PSP. The software also provides a variety of encoding tools for additional formats including standard and HD. The list includes: WMV, MOV, MPEG-1, H.264, 3GP, and MPEG-4.

Muvee Reveal 7.x is available for $79.95. Additional templates are available—some are free and some are available in low-cost add-on packages.

What do we think?

As is so often the case, the secret to having fun with Muvee is to relax and not demand too much of the software. Just push the button and have fun. We’ve been playing with similar software from Roxio (PhotoShow), and from Corel (Digital Studio 2010) and these products too, have their talents. Roxio has concentrated on photos and simple online tools—they’ll make their money from upgrades, they hope. Corel has focused on imaging, photobooks, and fast video publishing.

Our biggest troubles come when we think these really simple tools ought to do something and we waste enormous amounts of time looking for a particular feature. Sometimes it’s the easiest interface that’s the most daunting because you’re sure you’re missing something. You are not. Muvee Reveal is designed to give people the ability to create something nice from all their videos and photos from the vacation and get on with their lives.

Some people have absolutely no trouble getting that concept into their heads and they already love Muvee. We’re getting the hang of it and inflicting Muvees on anyone who holds still in our presence. If you have an iPhone, no one is safe.