Product Review: Page (1) of 2 - 01/11/06

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muvee AutoProducer is a fun application to use that outputs surprisingly interesting videos. The company has just released version 5 that adds several new features, among them Magic Moments, Magic Spot, and Tweak Movie. The company is really promoting the moniker that "Video editing is dead." But is it really?  In this review, we'll go over the new features as well as the step by step process to create a muvee.

The Start up screen shows in steps via icons how to create a muvee. There are four main steps (1 Get your media; 2. Select an editing style; 3. Click "make muvee"; and 4. Save or burn your muvee) to creating a muvee as well as some optional features (magic moments, magic spot, and tweak movie) that are new in version 5. Since the application is so fun to use, we'll quickly cover the four main steps as well as the new optional features, starting with Step 1.

Your first step in creating a muvee in autoProducer 5 is to get your media. muvee enables you to import video, pictures, music, as well as capture video. The icons, which are located at the top of the screen, labeled add video/pictures, describe what media you wish to work with fairly clearly. For example, if you wish to work with music, the icon is a musical note, pictures is a picture, etc. From the add video/picture window, you can click on any media from the window and it will appear in the preview window, located in the center of the screen. If the media is a still image, it will  just be a preview of the image. If it is a video, you can play it with full VCR style control. This is ideal if you wish to look at the video before you commit to it. 

When you select video, you can use one of the new features in version 5, called Magic Moments. It takes a thumbs up/thumbs down approach to your video. When you select Magic Moments, it will first analyze the clip. After it finishes analyzing the clip, you can get to work, choosing which portions of the clip you wish to keep in the final muvee, and which portions you wish to exclude. you use a green thumbs up button to highlight specific portions of the clip and a red thumbs down to delete those sections that you don't want.

Magic Moments uses a thumbs up thumbs down approach.

The idea with Magic Moments is to highlight short footage, perhaps several seconds, in a clip. If you create a long Magic Moment, say more than one minute in duration, the software will prompt you that it might not look good because the duration is too long.

With the new magicSpot, you can also highlight the best portions of a photograph. magicSpot enables you to do this manually, where you choose your own selection, or automatic, which is done by the software. magicSpot will better highlight those portions of the photo that you deem are the "sweet spot." After you've added your videos and photograph, you can then select a music style. You can grab any audio file or even a song from your library.

magicSpot is sort like a pan and zoom effect, but you control what part of the photograph you want to highlight.

Once you've selected the music, you can adjust the music settings to use all the music that you've added to the project, smartJoin multiple music files, which will automatically add cross-fade the music track, and normalize the music so the audio playback volume is at the same level. You can also set the sound mix level to maintain a focus on the music or the soundtrack of the existing video.   

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