Downloads

Folks like my mom are never going to use a computer unless whatever they're trying to do is dead simple. Fortunately, when it comes to creating movies, that's pretty much what Muvee's Reveal (nee autoProducer) is all about. It's an exceptionally easy to use program that takes photos, videos, and music from your hard drive, camera, or video recorder and creates a classy-looking movie with them. FX, fades, cuts, soundtrack--the whole deal is there in a style of your choosing. The end result is impressively professional.

Reveal's GUI is a study in common sense. Each of the four main panels (Photos and Video (add), Styles (choose), Music (add), and Play (preview the movie) are numbered in the order they should be utilized and relevant options are available either by clicking on the object, a link, or by right-clicking. I was never for one instant in doubt about where to find something.

My only interface complaint is that Reveal could reveal more about bypassing the stylistic elements. As it stands, the you might get the impression that you can't bypass all of them to do simple video transcoding. You can using the following method that was emailed to me from tech support:
- Select the Classic Vanilla Style.
- Open Style settings and check "Disable transition colors and use dissolves only"
- Open Personalize, select the Duration tab and select "Use all photos and video"
- Disable Title, Credits on their respective tabs
- Select the Settings tab and disable motion and crossfade effects; zero the Music, Voiceover, and Style Sound Effects faders; and crank the Video Soundtrack fader.

Video editing is limited in Reveal (you can split a video clip but can't cut, paste, set end points, etc.). There are, however, a fair number of photo enhancements such as noise and red-eye removal, color enhancement, and so forth. You can also control the placement of a magicSpot function, which mimics shining a narrow beam spotlight on the photo. A fair amount of tweaking to the eight provided styles is possible, and you can purchase more online.

Reveal is a rather hefty 90 meg download, and you must also install the .NET 3.0 framework and Microsoft C++ redistributable, so factor in another 300MB or so in time and disk space if you haven't already installed them at the behest of another program. The program crashed on me once after substantial editing, which incited me to issue the following warning: Save your project often! You can output the actual movie to WMV, AVI, Quicktime, h.264, MPEG-1 and -2, and 3GP as well as upload as to Muvee's sharing site www.Shwup.com where it's converted to Flash video. You don't have to know which format to save, Reveal defaults to output by device: DVD, PSP, cell phones, etc.

While I'd like better video editing and a simple way to bypass styles, Reveal produces equal or better results than I've experienced with the comparable CineMagic, found in Roxio's Easy Media Creator Suite. The program crashed once or twice, but all in all it's great at what it does and super easy to use. Then again, CineMagic is only one part of a massive media suite that offers tons of other features--for the same chunk o'change.

--Jon L. Jacobi