Are you looking for the best and easiest way to create digital photo slide shows or music videos that you can burn to DVD or copy to a Video iPod or other portable video player? 

Are you looking for a great way to preserve and/or share your digital pictures and/or your digital video clips with others who may or may not have a personal computer? Would you like to keep it easy and inexpensive for you AND for them?

Have you tried PowerPoint, Premiere Elements, Photoshop Elements, Pinnacle Studio, ProShow Gold, Windows Movie Maker and Photo Story, and found them challenging or lacking or both?

If all of the above are true for you, too, then I hope you'll benefit from my experience.  muvee Technologies of Singapore makes specialized software you purchase for your PC to put your content to music in a professional-looking show you can burn to DVD or Video CD (VCD).  Your family or friends can then play your "muvee" back in their DVD player on their TV.  I liked muvee so much I made arrangements with muvee's co-founder to promote it with user groups and here on eBay.  We've been delighting people who find it ever since!  And you don't have to take my word for it either, because I'm admittedly biased because I sell so many of these.  Just consider all the rave reviews muvee has gotten from novices and professionals alike - you can find a smattering of them in my auctions for muvee autoProducer.

The Easy Way

If you're a firm believer in TANSTAAFL (There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch), then just skip this section and jump to 'The Hard Way,' because you're probably not going to believe what I'm about to tell you anyway. However, if you're excited about the possibility that there's an easy way to create compelling productions from your own content, easily burn them to DVD or video CD, preserve your memories and have fun doing it, and just in general making your life simpler and better, then read on.

The closest-thing-you-can-find-to-a-free-lunch is a simple, $129.95 (you can get it for quite a bit less on eBay, of course) software product called muvee autoProducer 6.

It not only takes your inputs (digital photos, digital music and/or digital video files) and effortlessly transforms them almost magically into a professional-looking multimedia production, but it then lets you burn that production easily to a DVD or to a Video CD (VCD). You know what a DVD is - it's a disc that contains about a 2-hour moving picture show in a format that plays back on your TV from a DVD player - but not as many know what a VCD is. Simply put, it's a DVD that's been burned to a regular CD-R or CD-RW that contains only 15 to 20 minutes worth of video instead of almost 2 hours. The advantage of burning a VCD is, of course, time and money. You don't need a DVD burner and you won't be asking family and friends to watch two hours worth of home movies.  Trust me - 15 to 20 minutes of a muvee production will leave them wanting more. Give them one long 2-hour production, no matter how good it is, and they may never get around to watching it in the first place. Much better to give them multiple short segments and let them choose.  If you already have a DVD burner, then you can also burn numerous muvee productions of a few minutes each to a DVD or Video CD and viewers can select which one they want to watch using their DVD remote control from the DVD menu muvee creates and displays.

muvee also lets you save your video productions to a variety of useful file formats for playback on a PC (use mpeg2) or a Video iPod (use Quicktime or .MOV) or other video player, or for sharing over the web or via e-mail.  It's highly flexible and respectful of industry standard formats.

The great thing about muvee autoProducer is that it has absolutely no peer in the quality of the output you get for the amount of time you spend manipulating the inputs. You simply tell it which pictures, video, and music you would like to use, which style you would like your production to be (muvee comes with 24 varied styles), type in what you would like to have on your title page and credits page, and click on 'make muvee' and watch the preview. If you like what you see, click the 'Save / Burn' icon - with picture of a CD and a diskette - customize the DVD / VCD a bit to match your tastes, and voila - it burns you a masterpiece. If you don't like what you see on the first pass (which is rare), you can tweak and tune to your hearts content simply by changing settings, using the various tools and features that are never more than a click or two away. MagicMoments lets you give a Thumbs-Up or a Thumbs-Down to segments of your video you MUST HAVE or DON'T WANT, respectively. Click on MagicSpot to customize and fine-tune muvee's motion (such as pan, zoom in, or zoom out) on still pictures. Change Settings to blend your video soundtrack with music, normalize your music, tell it to smoothly transition from one song to the other, shuffle your content or keep it in order, and more.

Try a different style if you want to dramatically change the overall - what else - style of the presentation of the muvee production. Most people find that the 8 built-in superStyles (which give you hundreds of variations if you customize the styles) meet their needs, but many users also love muvee so much and use it enough that they want the ultimate flexibility that comes from expanding the number and variety of styles available for use with muvee. That's where stylePacks come in: you can buy (for less than $20 each) muvee stylePacks, which are themed collections of new and different styles. Each stylePack contains between 2 (in the case of the Laurence Gartel stylePack or the FREE Valentines stylePack) and 24 styles (in the case of the Pro Classic or Pro Modern stylePacks). I'm often asked which stylePacks I recommend. Well, for starters, I like the Keep-It-All Pack because it gives muvee expanded functionality and capability, namely the ability to prevent muvee from artistically selecting and shuffling scenes from your video for you. That can come in handy when you like your video just the way you shot it and simply want to put it to music and/or render it for widescreen viewing. I also love the new Cherish and photoGenie stylePacks, which include 3 superStyles each.  I like the Pro-Modern and Pro-Classic stylePacks because they give you a variety of speeds and elegantly crafted but unobtrusive stylistic variations. After those 3, I'd get photoMemories, High Octane, coolStyles 1 and coolStyles 2, PhotoCentric, Wedding, Christmas, Kids, and Vacation, depending on which are thematically closest to the kinds of video I want to produce, and after previewing samples at muvee's web site. So just think of stylePacks as optional muvee expansion packs.

Now, if you're convinced already that muvee is what you need, then just go to eBay and search on 'muvee autoProducer'  - don't be alarmed that there aren't as many sellers as you'll find with, say, Adobe. muvee primarily markets to original equipment makers (OEM) and hasn't been very aggressive with advertising or marketing in the U.S. - but demand for muvee is high and they're getting fantastic word-of-mouth, because the product is just amazing - but they're being smart and limiting distribution while it catches on.  muvee often comes with HP systems or Sony camcorders or Nikon cameras - so if you already have a limited version of muvee, you may want to look into all the benefits that come from upgrading. 

If you're NOT convinced by now that muvee is right for you, read on. You're probably a candidate for doing things the hard way.

The Hard Way

The hard way to burn a CD with your content is to learn how to create a slide show or video using digital photo and/or video editing software such as Adobe Photoshop and Premiere Elements, Microsoft Digital Image Suite, Photo Story, Movie Maker, 3D Album, or whatever (there are dozens of packages you'll need to analyze and choose from). These packages will let you manipulate and fine-tune your content and give you immense control over every detail of the final production - however, they also require you to learn HOW to do that (both technically and artistically), in often excruciating detail. Plan on spending many hours reading, studying, and experimenting before you'll be able to even have anything to show for your efforts on your project - and even then it probably won't be something you'll want to share with anyone. You'll need to know all about scene or photo selection, storyboards, timelines, transitions, effects, editing, dubbing, and a variety of other topics. Once you master those topics, you can create a video in one of a plethora of different formats - but you'll probably want to save it as an MPEG2 file (which is the best combination of quality and compression) THEN you'll need to do the same thing with some form of DVD-authoring software in order to create the DVD from the content you create. *Whew!* Seriously, unless you plan on doing it professionally, you won't want to do it the hard way - and even then, a lot of professionals use muvee as a preprocessor or postprocessor to enhance their final productions. It's that good.

Getting the Video to Digital

One question that often arises is how to get your video onto your computer so you can make a DVD of them.

1. If you have a digital camera that takes digital video too, or a digital camcorder that writes it to a mini-DVD, then you just copy over your video files along with your pictures. No problem.
2. If you have a digital camcorder with a USB 2.0 or IEEE 1394 (iLink or Firewire) interface, then you just need the right cable and a corresponding interface port or card on your PC, and muvee will let you capture your video from your digital camcorder.
3. If your video is still on magnetic media (such as a VHS or camcorder tape) or film, I recommend you simply take your most important film or tapes to a place like Sam's Club or Costco or to a store like Ritz or Wolf or somewhere you find in the Yellow Pages. Although they charge you to convert them, the enhanced quality and time you save should be reason enough to avoid trying to do it all yourself even if you buy the right equipment.

Summing It Up

In conclusion, then, burning a DVD from your own digital pictures and video is easy if you're willing to spend about $75 for a wonderful piece of software named muvee autoProducer 5, and about an hour of your time to install it and read the (actually helpful) help files. The alternative is to do what I did before muvee came along - spend hundreds of dollars and dozens of hours wading through articles and PC app after PC app and related program documentation trying to learn all the ins-and-outs of video editing, DVD-authoring, CD and DVD burning, and more. Even if you do, you'll probably end up with muvee anyway. Experts agree: the more you know about this subject, the more you'll love muvee.

One more thing - I've tried to be fair and upfront in everything I've said in this Guide.  Even though I sell (a LOT of) muvee autoProducer here on eBay, that's not the reason I'm high on muvee.  I sell it on eBay BECAUSE I'm high on muvee.  I don't sell or recommend anything I wouldn't or didn't buy myself.  If you've found anything above that helps you in any way, won't you take a second of your time and click on the Yes button below?  Many thanks - I appreciate your time and hope you enjoyed reading my Guide.

Dave Whittle