You've got hours of video tape to edit but simply no time to spare to sit in front of a PC for at least a day. So the tapes sit gathering dust until you find a whole weekend to cobble together a semi-watchable five minute movie. Even those of us passionate about editing can sometimes find it hard to make the time to for our hobby, so I can imagine how difficult editing can be for the less enthusiastic. What if you didn't have to spend hours labouring over those precise cuts? What if your capture software was fully automated and did all the artistic work for you? This is exactly what muvee autoProducer claims to do.
Version 5 of muvee autoProducer promises to be the 'fastest, easiest and most fun way to transform your video and pictures into slick productions". Given I spend (what seems like) the entirety of my spare time cobbling together 'watchable' videos, spending a few seconds to create a slick production seems a step in the right direction. So how does muvee autoProducer compare to a human with a sprinkling of talent and a huge dollop of time? Rather than simply review autoProducer, I'll let you decide - at the end of the review you'll find two separate videos from exactly the same footage. The footage is your typical bog standard home movie monstrosity which requires a heap of inspiration to turn into anything approaching watchable. So can autoProducer outperform me? More importantly, is it worth me spending hours editing when muvee does a better job in minutes?
The first step in creating your masterpiece is importing your video into muvee autoProducer. You can either capture direct from your DV camera, or use existing footage on your harddrive. There's 3 icons at the top right of the window: import video, import pictures and capture from your camera. As I'd already captured my footage for my previous project, I simply imported this one 30 minute video into muvee. Once imported, you can start giving autoProducer a helping hand by choosing sections of the video you'd like excluded, and highlighting a key moments you'd like included. All this is done by clicking on the magicMoments icon. This brings up a separate window where the video is initially analysed. As the video plays in the monitor window, simply click and hold on the green thumbs up icon to mark the shots as 'magic moments', or click and hold the red thumbs down icon to exclude. For the initial test, I've marked the whole video as neutral. Once you've marked the areas, click OK to return to the main screen.
The next step is adding audio. Here I'm adding the same music I'd chosen for my original video I'd spent a few hours creating. Click on the add music icon to select the music to import into your project. Finally it's time to chose a style which matches my original video, so I've chosen Pro Fast which includes quick cuts and dissolves. Note that there are a whole range of styles available to chose... 28 to be precise. Each of these styles are distinct from the other and enhance your video by adding suitable cuts, transitions and effects. To get the perfect result, chose a style that matches both your video and music! Yet more styles can be purchased separately online. No two of your movies will ever be the same!
Now we've imported the video, chosen a piece of music and selected the style, the last remaining task it to produce our movie. So click on 'Do it now' to chose the length of your video, which I've selected to be exactly the same as my edit, and also how multiple audio tracks fit together. Finally click on make muvee to see your masterpiece!
Here is the video created by muvee with just a few seconds of input from myself. Bear in mind I didn't chose any magicMoments or exclude any unwanted video! Muvee autoProducer can export your finished video in a variety of formats including WMV for webstreaming or burn direct to a fully featured DVD with menus. Note however that muvee did not handle the 16:9 widescreen footage imported into the project and displayed this as 4:3 (in simple terms, the video looked all squashed up). To fix this, the video you see was exported from muvee as uncompressed, then encoded using tmpgenc xpress.
Remember the video has been completely created by muvee with no input from me. The original footage itself was also far from inspiring and I'd been dreading editing the video. You can of course achieve a better result by excluding unusable (or undesirable!) footage from your final video or use the tweak video setting to make quick touch ups to your video before exporting - either by letting muvee automatically chose alternate shots (similar or contrasting one), or manually chose the alternative. Notice that some of the shots include automatically were fast pans, which you can easily take out with magicMoments/
Muvee autoProducer is a god send for anyone that loathes endless hours of editing and I was genuinely surprised by what's produced from 30 minutes of dire video. The software certainly works and is recommended for all those lazy editors looking for an instant hit. In fact you may just trick your friends and family into believing you've spent hours perfecting your editing techniques! That said, to get the perfect results does require more than my severely limited input. I would recommend taking advantage of the magicMoments feature to ensure those dodgy shots are excluded and those priceless gems added. Although this adds to the time spent in front of your PC, the end results may well be more artistic than you'd ever be able to produce. It's certainly not a product for those editors amongst us that love to labour over every single edit, but it's an invaluable tool for the rest of you!
