Muvee Auto Producer 3

Muvee Auto Producer has defined its own category in digital video-editing - instant movie production. All home videoediting applications boast of their ease of use and would have you believe you can turn hours of dull camcorder footage into a professional movie in just a few minutes, but Muvee Auto Producer actually delivers the goods.

Essentially, Muvee takes a bunch of video clips and/or still images, and some audio files, and mixes them up to produce an edited sequence of a given length cut to one of a number of preset editing styles. And it works. The program is simple to use. The interface consists of just six buttons which are used to import the content, select the editing style and add captions. A preview monitor allows you to see the movie before saving it.

Clicking on the 'select video/pictures' button opens a dialogue box, which allows you to browse for files on your hard disk. There's also a capture module for manual capture of footage from a DV camcorder. With your clips selected the next task is to select a backing wav formats, but there's no way to directly rip CD audio tracks, which is a shame.

Next comes the most crucial and taxing task of the entire editing process, choosing an editing style. Each of the available styles includes a short description to make the task of choosing a little easier. For example, Breathe is a 'leisurely style and moderately paced transitions let you enjoy your video moments in total relaxation. Works best with slow, vocal music', ... bring on Van Morrison. In our favourite, over-the-top music video, 'fast cuts and transitions synchronise well with pop/techno beats for a high-energy music video' - works well with everything from Kylie to the Chemical Brothers. Other styles include cinema, cool moon, detective, 1950's TV and a variety of slideshow options. In addition to the 24 styles included, two newly released packs costing $14.94 (£8 approx), each including six additional styles, are available from the Muvee website.

The results are astonishingly good. You can press the button and let the application get on with it or, with a little bit of care, even better results can be achieved. Opening titles and closing credits can be added at but this is no titling editor. If you?re really keen you can choose the font, but this somehow seems to go against the spirit of things.

Choice of material is obviously a key factor. Basically, the more clips you can include the better. You can elect to keep the clips in sequence and use them once only, or have Muvee use them in random fashion, repeating them if necessary.

The best Muvees are short ones and a good approach is to get enough clips to last the duration of your backing track - usually about three to four minutes. If you don't have enough video material it will just repeat for the length of the music track. Alternatively, you can set the length of the Muvee using a slider - the visuals and audio very professionally fade to black after the specified time and the credits appear.

This new version of Muvee can handle stills as well as video and this makes it an excellent tool for the production of slideshows - pan and zoom are effectively used to add motion.

You can save finished movies to disk in DV, mpeg1, mpeg2 and wmv format and, given the simplicity of the rest of the program, there's a surprising degree of control over

There are all kinds of things you could do to 'improve' Muvee, such as add DVD burning, video and audio filters, but that would be missing the point, which is that you can take a bunch of clips and a piece of music and make a great video in less than a minute (we timed it). But one thing we'd definitely put on the wish list for version 4 is the ability to rip tracks direct from an audio CD.

If you like the idea of making great video shorts, but don?t have the time to devote to full-on editing, then Muvee Auto Producer is for you.

Contact: Muvee
www.muvee.com

System requirements:

• Windows 98SE, ME, 2000 or XP
• 550MHz CPU
• 128MB of Ram
• 16MB of video Ram
• 7,200rpm hard disk
• DirectX 9.0