Muvee Reveal - video editing for the rest of us

October 30, 1:08 PMGadgets ExaminerDan Appleman

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The movies may not be "instant", but nobody
comes closer.

Every now and then you run into a piece of software that, by looking at a task in a new way, completely changes the nature of that task – making it dramatically easier than it was before.

If you’ve ever done video editing, you know that most editing programs work more or less the same way. You divide your video into clips that you arrange in the order you choose, and then possibly add some audio for the background and transition effects before burning a final video to DVD or uploading it to YouTube. It’s a lot of work and very, very time consuming.

Muvee Reveal will change the way you look at video editing. It accomplishes this by offering exactly the opposite of most people think they want in software – by reducing the number of available features supported. Instead of trying to do to do everything, Muvee Reveal handles the most common video editing tasks in a new way. As a result, it allows casual home users to create really good looking videos in a fraction of the time of traditional programs. It also makes the program virtually useless to professionals or anyone wanting to do traditional video editing – but that’s ok. Even pros may find Muvee Reveal a great solution for quick home videos.

Instead of selecting clips and carefully adjusting the start and end of each clip and the transitions between them, Muvee Reveal begins by allowing you to import and arrange the clips and still photographs you want to use. You can then specify a background soundtrack. Reveal will then create a final video, automatically adjusting the clips and stills in a variety of ways to make the video fit the duration of the background music. It can adjust start and end points in a clip, the speed of a clip, and add zooms and pans to still photos. The software offers advice if there are not enough or there are too many video elements for the soundtrack. Transitions are applied based on a theme that you select.

In many cases even the first pass at the video will look remarkably good. You can then make a variety of adjustments to tweak the video.

Here is a simple example that I put together using some video and photographs from a recent visit to Acapulco. Even though I did not have enough footage to make the software “happy”, it nevertheless put together a video in less than half an hour that would have taken considerably longer using other software.

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