Muvee photoCentric style pack [ Review ]

By Jan Ozer
Let's face it, pan and zoom, transitions, and sync to music are nice. But most slide shows we produce are still fairly prosaic, creatively chained to the earth, so to speak, by tools with limited options and by the truth that few of us are trained as movie makers. You can accept this status quo, or you can try muvee autoProducer ($69.99 direct) with the new muvee photoCentric style pack ($19.95 direct. Though the lack of control can get frustrating, the results are almost sure to delight.

muvee autoProducer made its bones as a program for converting raw video footage into a music videolike production. The workflow is similar with video and still images: You insert your files into the program, add background music, and choose a "style" that dictates the pace and the range of special effects applied. The program then analyzes the content and pieces it into a production that often rivals MTV quality, a process that took less than 2 minutes with our 100-image test file. After the initial analysis, you can test other styles and preview them in just a few seconds.

On our tests, with the Action photoCentric style, muvee elegantly applied more than 15 different effects, including multipoint pan and zoom, image rotation, transparencies, wipes, and picture-in-picture with multicolor frames and widescreen framing, all at a swift pace of about one effect every 2 seconds or so. The result is stunningly different from that delivered by any of the other products reviewed here; it's almost as if you paid a local film student to create your slide show for you.

Admittedly, there are several drawbacks to this approach, primarily the lack of control. When muvee is finished, it delivers a final, edited muvee that you can't adjust. muvee's content-detection algorithms seem to pick faces out fairly well, so these are generally well presented. But in our test videos, some full-length shots of a newborn baby were very poorly framed, and our only option was to try a different style (you get six in the photoCentric pack) or delete the image from the slide show.
muvee doesn't offer narration capabilities, and you also have to trim, crop, and color-correct your images beforehand, as muvee lacks these features. DVD-burning options are also limited; you can add multiple videos to a DVD, but you have to choose between nine largely fixed menu templates.

Source:pcmag