I won a copy of Muvee Reveal software at a twitter party hosted by Iowa Geek a few weeks ago and I was eager to give it a try.  Now, before I start, let me say that I’m no expert on video, but I like to edit things enough to get “just the good stuff” and trim it down a little.

In the past, I’ve used Windows Movie Maker because 1) it’s free and 2) it’s what I have on my computer.

This is a video I did of the threshing demonstration at Farmamerica’s Fall Festival, done in Windows Movie Maker.

This is a video of the same day, done in Muvee Reveal.

Then I made a few quick changes in Muvee Reveal (style and music–took less than 5 minutes) and it’s quite a different film:

Do you prefer the finished product of one over the other?  Keep in mind that the video quality isn’t terrific; I took the video using my super-small Canon SD1000 digital camera.  I estimate that I spent about the same amount of time on each.  Windows Movie Maker allows some stopping/starting of clips that you can’t do in Muvee Reveal, but I found it just as easy to split the Muvee Reveal clips apart and delete the parts I didn’t want.

Muvee Reveal is definitely easy to use; you just import the photos and videos that you want to use, tweak a few settings, add some music if you wish, and it will create a video that matches the music in length and tempo.  If your clips are too long for the song(s), it merely picks out portions of each clip or drops out some.  At first I was frustrated by this, but after playing for a few minutes, I figured out how to highlight the areas that I definitely wanted used, or to delete the frames I didn’t like.

I tend to like the basic styles, but there are fun and crazy styles that can be used as well, and if there aren’t enough in the basic software, you can purchase additional styles online.

I like the ease-of-use of the Muvee Reveal software, and how it mixes the photos with the videos to show the entire experience, without me worrying so much if I’ve taken video footage or still photos.

Windows Movie Maker, however, seems to allow more flexibility for captioning, including putting captions between frames, and more options for credits and titles.

I’m sure it’s possible to add background music in WMM, but I didn’t look into how to do it.  Muvee Reveal makes it very easy, so once I found some royalty-free music to use, I’ll use background music with most of my videos.  Is it a good addition, or does it detract from the video?

Thinking that I wanted to do more with videography, I purchased a JVC camcorder and quickly learned that neither Windows Movie Maker nor Muvee Reveal would read the .mod format.  There are format translators available, but I’m just not excited enough about video to go through a lot of steps for it.  My little Flip records in a .mp4 format and Muvee Reveal can read that, although Windows Movie Maker cannot.

The program has shut down on me suddenly a few times and I’ve yet to find a pattern for that, so I need to remember to save often.  On the other hand, it’s not a big memory hog and I can have it running with several other programs on my mediocre computer.  (I downloaded a trial of a Corel movie editor and it overwhelmed my resources.) It also takes quite a while to save the finished product to your computer, so be sure you save time for that before promising you’ll have it on YouTube in three minutes.

For a novice who wants to do basic video editing and come up with a quick finished product, Muvee Reveal is a good solution. While it doesn’t pack the punch of more sophisticated video-editing software, it is easy to use and produces a nice “muvee.”

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