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The latest version of muvee. autoProducer6, edits your videos for you automatically. It can mix video and digital still images of numerous file formats and quality levels with a music soundtrack. It reviews and corrects your video footage, still images and graphics, cutting them to a your favorite music tracks. The software decides what goes where and then, adds effects and titles, all in just a matter of minutes. In fact, it should take less than an hour to create your first cool looking muvee.
All About muvee
Once you have downloaded and installed the product on your Windows computer (muvee runs on Windows 2000, XP and the new Vista), you begin by selecting and inputting your video, still, graphic and audio components. You can capture video directly from your DV camcorder via Firewire. You can also import video from other cameras and devices by first moving it from the device to your computer’s hard drive.
Muvee autoProducer6 supports a wide range of video types – from MPEG1, MPEG2, MPEG4, DV, AVI, WMV, ASF, MOV (QuickTime), DivX and even 3GP from cell phones. You can also import an assortment of still images formats such as JPEG, JPG, GIF, BMP, PNG and TIFF. For audio, you can use MP3, WAV, AAC and WMA.
On the right side of the Media Panel, there are three buttons – one for inputting video, one for inputting still images and one for capturing video from a camcorder. You use standard Microsoft Windows commands to load your video and still image files into the Media Panel. If you use lots of sources, and want to see them all, you can use the Expand Media Panel button to make the panel full screen.
Once you have all your visual components loaded into the Media Panel, you can then choose what music you want. You can use one or several music tracks for your video. When you create your muvee, you can mix and change volumes of the music tracks as well as the original audio from the video. You can also record and mix in a separate narration track.
The next step is to pick a style. The trial program ships with 8 “superstyles”. However, when you buy the full program, you get a package of 24 additional “core” styles included as well. These will need to be separately downloaded and installed. And if those styles are not enough, you can purchase and download many more “style packs” from the online muvee site.
You then go the muvee Personalize section to select the length of the music. You match the muvee to the length of the song or pick a specific length. You can create your own opening titles and closing credits with a variety of font and animation options to select from. You can also use the video/pictures tab to make additional choices regarding how you want your muvee to be created. I’d recommend coming back to that tab after you have created the first couple versions that muvee creates for you.
Once you have those options selected, you are ready to make a basic muvee. Hit “Make muvee” The program then goes through your selected videos, stills, graphics and music and analyzes them to find people, faces, movement, etc. This is the true magic of muvee. They have made an assumption that what most of us want to see in a video are the faces of our friends and family. If that is not true of your video, you can use the Face Bias tab in the video/pictures tab in the Personalize section to adjust that emphasis.
This analysis process can take a few minutes depending on how much video and images you are working with and how powerful your computer is. You can go get a cup of coffee or do a short chore. For example, muvee took about 10 minutes to analyze an 18-minute video clip of my daughter's birthday party with my 2.33 GHz Windows XP computer. When muvee is done analyzing the raw video, stills, music, etc., it will create a finished muvee for you that combines your video clips, still images, titles and music tracks with the style you have selected.
The good news is once a particular piece of source video has been analyzed, it won’t need to be analyzed again. If you decide to try a different style, the program does it almost immediately. If you add additional stills, graphics or music to your project, only those new pieces will need to be analyzed.
If you don’t like the muvee, you can hit make muvee again and it will create a slightly different version based on the same style you selected. Or if you want to try something completely different, just pick a different style and make another muvee. You can save each one with a different name and then make a new version based on your choice of video, stills and music.
Once you like your finished muvee, you save it as a project first, and then hit the muvee share button – on the far right at the bottom of the screen. A window opens up that enables you to select among your saved muvees and then export them to a variety of formats. You can save it for computer playback in a variety of file formats; you can save it for playback on a pocket PC or a phone. You can save it for web streaming as either a windows media file or a QuickTime file, or you can burn it to a disk. You can burn DVDs, video CDs or super video CDs. The disc-burning program allows you to combine a bunch of muvees onto a single disc – assuming that there is space. You can also pick from a selection of menus and create your own disc titles.
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