Menu Creation:  

With Muvee Reveal you can import your videos and add chapters automatically or manually. We found the automatic chaptering to be a little excessive and we were unable to modify or recombine the chapters once they were cut. To change the cut chapters we had to re-import the entire clip.

Perhaps Muvee Reveal’s most interesting feature is the MagicMoments. The way Muvee renders your videos is it takes your whole video than selects clips to display in a kind of video montage. Instead of traditional chaptering you can select sections of your videos that you would like to include or exclude in your montage.

Frankly, we are still a little confused with Muvee Reveal’s menu method. There aren’t traditional menu templates, buttons or navigation options. Muvee includes a small selection of transition styles like pan and zoom, cube twists and stripes that seem better suited to photograph slideshows.

The menu options don’t show up until you decide to burn a DVD near the end of the process. You are presented with an option to select your DVD theme which then displays a normal DVD menu. However, you have little to no control over the menu display and there are only 10 themes to choose from. You can change the background image and include music, titles or credits, but you can’t adjust your buttons, add submenus or change clip titles.

Features:  

Muvee Reveal’s feature set is hit and miss. It includes a number of features you don’t usually see in DVD Authoring software like video sharing and conversion.You can also directly capture images from your digital cameras and camcorders. Muvee also works with the online video site Shwup.com to help you host your finished videos online for your friends and family to see and enjoy.

However, Reveal lacks some of features you do usually see in DVD Authoring software like minor video editing functions and traditional drag and drop. Although there is some limited drag and drop functionality with videos that have already been imported. We also found that Muvee will not publish a DVD or compilation if your music is longer than the total length of your video clips.

We also found that although you can directly import your video from your DV camcorder Muvee Reveal cannot read a DVD disc directly in the drive nor can it read DVD VOB files. Videos from DVD need to be ripped to your hard drive and converted to a more compatible format like AVI or MPEG.

Ease of Use:  

Factoring Muvee Reveal’s ease of use is difficult to weight. Visually, Reveal is appealing and clean. When you first launch the program each section of the interface is numbered displaying the order in which you should proceed with your project. However, if you have ever seen or used any other DVD Authoring software you’ll quickly find that Reveal is designed quite differently.

There are essentially two buttons located on Reveal’s main screen. The personalize button includes all of your customization and setting options, the share button provides you with your publish choices such as DVD, mobile device, iPod, web and more. You can only design a menu if you choose to burn to a DVD. In the end the simplicity works against Muvee Reveal.

One of the major factors playing into Muvee Reveal’s ease of use is the quirky, buggy nature of the entire program. Its overall instability makes the software difficult to use.

Quality of Copy:  

Unfortunately, we were unable to create a DVD using Muvee Reveal. It took more than an hour to render and a 10 minute video, then the software encountered a runtime error and shut down. This runtime error also interfered with a number of other applications we had running at the same time resulting in a hard reboot. This happened multiple times.

Ease of Installation/ Stability:  

Above all this is where we experienced the most frustration using the Muvee Reveal software. Reveal relies heavily on your graphics card to perform its video tasks. We installed Reveal on four test machines and all of them needed a graphics driver update before it could function properly. We followed the steps suggested by Muvee’s FAQ to update our drivers but that suggestion didn’t work which resulted in us contacting support for additional help.

We are a little surprised that none of our machines could support Reveal’s requirements. Additionally in Muvee’s computer specifications there is no mention of display driver requirements.

We also had to install some additional Microsoft framework, which is common but takes a long time to update and we noticed Muvee Reveal is a system hog and frequently using a lot of CPU while it was running and frequently freezing or interfering with other applications we had open on the computer like Word documents. This is especially apparent when trying to render and burn a DVD as previously mentioned.

Additionally if Muvee Reveal freezes or encounters an error and needs to shut down the program cannot be immediately re-accessed. Although random shut downs and freezes aren’t uncommon with DVD Authoring software Muvee Reveal is unique in that you have to access the task manager and shut down the Muvee process before you can open the application again and continue your project. Otherwise, if you just try to double-click the shortcut the program won’t open.

Help/Support:  

As previously mentioned we had to contact Muvee customer support a few times to get our graphic drivers updated. Our first technical support issue was responded to overnight suggesting I send them a computer diagnostic file so they could help with the driver. Our inquiry was passed to another technician. It had been several days and we had almost given up on Muvee when our second email was responded to and included links to the drivers we needed to install. Overall, the email support was friendly and helpful. We just wish the second email would have gotten back to just a bit quicker.

In addition to email support Muvee includes a built-in user guide and online knowledge base. However, the user guide doesn’t include a search feature. In the future we’d like to see that option implemented.

Muvee Reveal is perhaps better used as a photo and video slideshow program. It doesn’t embody true DVD Authoring functionality and it seems that Muvee Reveal loses something in its simplicity. Additionally, we suspect the average user would encounter many of the same installation and stability problems we experienced making this software extremely frustrating.