Muvee Autoproducer

This amazing program is the ultimate video editing program if you want to create a movie with the least possible effort and you don't mind giving up control over the final result. If you are taking video editing really serious, this program is not for you, but it might still be interesting for making a musical video clip.

The work flow of the program is organized as a simple 6 step process. The main window contains 7 buttons which guide you step by step through the whole process. No timeline, no playing with transitions or special effects. Nothing, just 7 buttons plus a preview window... The trick of the program is that you import a number of video files plus some music files, select one of the predefined styles and the program will do the rest. The program will analyze color, textures and motion in the video footage and tempo and rhythm in the music files. Together with the defined style, the program will create an edit.

With the program you can directly capture video from a Digital camcorder connected to a standard Firewire port. It includes Device Control for play, fast forward, rewind and record. When capturing, it also reads and stores the time code to be used in scene detection. The program does not interface with an analog capture card. You can also import any type of video file stored on your hard disk for use in your movie. Besides AVI file, also MPEG-1 and -2 are accepted.

Optionally you can tell the program to use certain scenes and to avoid others. This is done by a button called Magic Moments. This lets you browse through the files and give a 'thumbs up' for scenes that you want to use and a 'thumbs down' for scenes you don't want. Autoproducer will determine by itself if it uses scenes that have not been given a rating.

After you have imported your video files, you can import audio files (music). Here it is important to try to select music that fits the type of most of scenes that you are in the video files. You can import as many files as you want. The audio files will e used in the order in which they are placed in a list. Accepted formats are .wav, .mp3 and .wma.

After importing all your materials you select the style. The package comes with a total of 24 different styles and you can order more of them from Muvee. The selected style will determine very much how the final result is going to look like. To give you a good understanding how this works, here are a few of them:

• Cinema: widescreen, rich colors and a moderate pace
• Classic Sepia: 1930's film style in sepia color, including 'hair and dust' and those typical jumps caused by missing frames
• Extreme Music: short shots, with quick changes on the rhythm of the music
• Personal: emphasis on people and close-up of faces.

Of course it is very important to make a suitable combination of music, video and style in order to get an acceptable result.

At the end you can add some titles, but you have no possibility to change fonts, colors, position or anything else. The title is completely defined by the style and you only can change the text that will e shown at the beginning and the end of the production

After review of the work you can export to DV-AVI, any AVI files with codecs installed on your system, MPEG-1 (with a built in encoder from MainConcept) and .wmv.

All in all, the program does not offer a lot of freedom to use your own creativity and it will therefore not be very suitable for all types of movies. I did several tests and I found that it can give pretty good results for music video clips or short clips that only have the purpose to give a short overview and create a certain atmosphere.