muveeNow Editor's Review

'muveeNow' is a slideshow and movie making software. As a trend, lately, programs such as these work as a wizard-like structure. Due to this, the program is very easy to use.

The program guides you through the settings and you can be sure that you'll use all the features at the right time.To import files you can use drag and drop. As an input file it accepts many image formats as well as many video formats.

The first step of the wizard is the one were you load your image or video files. When it comes to images, you can rotate them if needed. As for the video file, you have a video player here to preview it. In the next step you can add audio files which will be used for the soundtrack. Also in the second step you can select the style you want to use for your output file and you can preview the output file as it looks till now. The style can be personalized by setting up a few options like 'muvee' duration, mixer controls, opening title and end credits. Unfortunately here I discovered a flaw. The program has a feature which should allow you to choose the background picture for the opening title and end credits, but when I tried to use this feature the program closed.

The third step is the file saving. Here you may choose between 5 output types. You can burn it onto a disc, save it for email, web streaming, mobile device or simply save it on your computer. If you choose to create a disc (DVD, VCD, SVCD) the program will create a disc menu and you have to chose the theme of this menu. For email and web streaming you can chose between 3 levels of quality. For mobile device though, you have many settings. Besides the quality you can also set the frame size and frame rate. By far the most available settings are for saving for PC. You can choose among six file types and besides video settings you can make audio settings also. The time needed to create the output file disappointed me. For a 3 minutes long AVI file I had to wait almost twenty minutes to complete.

The user interface looks good and also due to the wizard like interface the program is very intuitive.

Pluses: Nice results.

Drawbacks / flaws: It is a little unstable, takes too long to create an output file.

In conclusion: I hope they will fix the stability problems in the next release. I enjoyed testing it. The results were nice.

version reviewed: 2.1