15-Minute Reviews :: muveeNow 2.2.0.3
Hello all and welcome to another 15-Minute Review! Today’s application is muveeNow version 2.2.0.3 by muvee Technologies – An application to create videos mixes of your photo and video collection.
Software Description
As Giveaway of the Day states:
“Make gorgeous photo movies & slideshows to music in 3 easy steps with muveeNow software. The easy-to-use wizard instantly mixes pictures, videos & music into pro-looking digital media masterpieces that you’ll be proud to share. Choose from a range of themed styles to create different looks – from up-tempo music videos, to scrapbooks, sentimental photo album tributes & more – then email, upload or burn them to a DVD right within muveeNow.”
Quick Pros
- Easy three-step wizard
- Some basic tools for quick correction
- 8 built-in styles with 2 free packs online (Total of 12)
- Plenty of output formats
- Resulting video is stylish and good-quality
Quick Cons
- Adding media files a bit slow
- Additional styles online beyond two packs can be pricy
- Lacking much customizability
- Can only save one way at a time
- Ensure you have QuickTime or QuickTime Alternative installed
- Slow encoding speed
Expansion
The process in this application is extremely simple 3-step process; Add the photos/videos (which is a bit slow and I’m not sure why) and apply the desired (basic) settings to each one; Add the music you’d like to play, pick the style and alter the basic customization settings; Make the video and decide how you’d like to save the resulting video. This is all laid out in an easy-to-follow wizard interface.
There are some basic tools for altering the video and photos you add; Rotation plus some basic image filters such as red-eye reduction, auto-enhance and noise-reduction. If you want more than this, you will want to bring the photos through your favorite editor first before entering muveeNow.
The package comes with 8 built-in styles and there are 4 more available online in two free packages (sign-up required), bringing the total up to 12. This may not seem like a lot, but these styles result in quite a bit more ‘flair’ and look to them, making your resulting video look like a professional post-production style. There are more styles available but unfortunately, they range from an affordable $7.95 to $24.95 (Half the price of the application itself.) With these styles, there isn’t a great deal of customizability – Pretty much the limits of your controls is being able to add a title and a credits page, alter the length of the video and a few other miscelaneous things. The newer and more-expensive superStyles apparently expand functionality, but the styles I chose were essentially canned packages.
There are plenty of output formats available; Create a DVD/SVCD/VCD, send the video as an email, save for portable formats as well as save to your computer as WMV, WMV-HD, MOV, MPEG-1, DV-AVI and AVI. All of these do have a good selection of output options too. A bit of a quirk I didn’t like is that you could only do one at a time; Make sure you save your project before you finalize the project.
During installation, the application checks to see if you have quicktime and tells you to install it before you run the application. This is done at the very beginning, and without a second thought I kept installing and forgot. When it came time to make the preview video, the application kept crashing without any error message. I remembered that you had to install quicktime first, so I picked up QuickTime Alternative (I recommend this over Apple’s bloat called iTunes + QuickTime for most users) and installed it, fixing the issue. After this, the process went okay, except encoding the video took quite a while to encode for 117 photos, even with a fast codec under AVI.
Final Verdict
Overall, the application isn’t bad if you don’t mind ‘canned’ designs. For free, it may not be a bad application for you to tinker with, and does make the add-on styles a little easier to chew on, price-wise, since you didn’t pay for the initial application. As for paying $49.95, this would be a lot for me to chew on myself or recommend to someone else, concidering for you to get more than 12 styles you have to start dishing out money very quickly; To get a few more styles, you can be paying $100 and up to build up a good collection.
Posted by BladedThoth on Friday, January 11, 2008
