Muvee Reveal just misses the DVD authoring mark. Instead of creating a traditional DVD like the other DVD authoring software we reviewed, Muvee took a typical slideshow program and tried to convert it into a DVD application. While it has some useful features and it's easy to use, this application falls short. It can, however, be quite useful for putting together a slideshow.
With Muvee Reveal you can import your videos and add chapters automatically or manually. The automatic chaptering often splits up movies into far too many sections, and there is no way to recombine the chapters once they have been cut. To change the cut chapters we had to re-import the entire clip and start over. You can, however, make even more chapters, but we think that would just be excessive.
We are confused with Muvee Reveal’s formatting options. There aren’t traditional templates, buttons or navigation options. Instead it takes all of the videos and photos imported and will combine them with the style chosen. These transitions include pan and zoom, cube twists and stripes that seem better suited to photograph slideshows and not DVDs. You can’t even choose how the clips are organized.
There are only 10 different menu layouts to choose from. You cannot customize the placement or the size of buttons on the menu templates, and you can't add submenus or even name your chapters. However, you can include a background image, and you can add titles and credits. You can also add music tracks to play behind the menu, titles and credits.
Muvee Reveal’s feature set is hit and miss. You can 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. Unfortunately, this application lacks some important features such as minor video editing functions and traditional drag-and-drop options. There are also complications when it comes to applying music to the video. There are lots of errors if the music is too long or too short, and it doesn’t offer any instructions to help you figure it out.
You can directly import your video from your DV camcorder, but Muvee Reveal cannot read a DVD 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.
Visually, Reveal is appealing and clean. When you first launch the program each section of the interface is numbered in the order you should proceed with your project. There are essentially two main 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. The other button is to save the project you are currently working on.
It took more than an hour to render and a 10 minute video, but 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.
We never did get a respectable copy of the video. The majority of the time, the application shut down without warning. When we did finally get a final copy, the video skipped and the transitions were patchy. It wasn't something we wanted to show our friends or family.
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 they could function properly. Muvee Reveal is a system hog and uses a lot of CPU while it was running.
Overall, the email support was friendly and helpful, but it took time to receive an answer to our question. In addition to email support, Muvee includes a built-in user guide and an online knowledgebase.
Muvee Reveal is perhaps better used as a photo and video slideshow program asit doesn’t embody true DVD authoring functionality. Additionally, we suspect the average user would encounter many of the same installation and stability problems we experienced, making this software extremely frustrating.
