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muvee for Mac? There must be something for the very lazy?

E

elh

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Oct 4, 2007
4
0
Don't hate me for wanting this...

Does anyone know if there is software such as muvee or Pinnacle's SmartMovie or ACD Video Magic for the Mac. (These are all automatic video editing software products that select "interesting" portions of video and match them to the tempo of a song you specify and add transitions and some image stabilization, etc. while you do NOTHING.)

I recently bought a Mac thinking that iMovie would do this better than Pinnacle (which is what I used in the past). But it seems that iMovie doesn't do it at all.

Does anyone have any suggestions? Should I just install Parallels and Windows and muvee (which I think is the current best/favorite option for automatic video editing)?
 
oh man... where to begin....


actually, no i wont...




why not just watch TV instead? its already edited, AND you dont even have to shoot any of it. just sit on your can and click a button.
 
I see that I posted to the wrong thread and maybe should have posted to Mac/Applications or Software. I never intended to do actual video editing like you guys. And I can understand that people would be frustrated by people like me wanting "dumbed down" and "automatic video editing software".

I just hoped someone would know if the kind of software I want is available for Mac.

It seems like a pretty understandable request that I get a bunch of home video of my toddler quickly into a format that I can send to my mom. I'm not sitting on my can, I'm chasing the baby around.

I'm not a film student or aspiring director and this software exists for people like me, I'm only asking if it exist for Macs. It's not my fault that Mac has been pushing for everybody and their uncle to buy a MacBook.
 
Lebowski said:
oh man... where to begin....


actually, no i wont...




why not just watch TV instead? its already edited, AND you dont even have to shoot any of it. just sit on your can and click a button.
Click to expand...

Oh, by the way, I don't even own a #%!&* TV.
 
elh said:
I see that I posted to the wrong thread and maybe should have posted to Mac/Applications or Software. I never intended to do actual video editing like you guys. And I can understand that people would be frustrated by people like me wanting "dumbed down" and "automatic video editing software".

I just hoped someone would know if the kind of software I want is available for Mac.

It seems like a pretty understandable request that I get a bunch of home video of my toddler quickly into a format that I can send to my mom. I'm not sitting on my can, I'm chasing the baby around.

I'm not a film student or aspiring director and this software exists for people like me, I'm only asking if it exist for Macs. It's not my fault that Mac has been pushing for everybody and their uncle to buy a MacBook.
Click to expand...

you dont have to be a film student to use imovie, thats the whole point in it, after watching the online vids you practically know everything, and then YOU can pick the content you want. also, what do you mean by "It's not my fault that Mac has been pushing for everybody and their uncle to buy a MacBook" ? that doesnt make much sense. designers often use macs and apple likes to push people to be creative not, as you put it, lazy i guess,
 
Come on, why all the judging? If the OP wants to be lazy about making video, that's his choice.

I thought that's what "Magic iMovie" was supposed to do, though I admit I never really looked at it until just now. It appears not to do any of the automatic scene choosing though, which is the most controversial part of your request.

I've played with muvee (and all those other apps just license the same technology under the hood), I even did a project for a friend once where I had it choose the scenes -- it turned out "ok", but not fantastic, and in retrospect I probably should have spent the hour or two I needed to edit it myself. But the concept is certainly interesting, if only to ask the question of whether it may ever be possible for a mathematical algorithm to boil down what is "interesting" in a video clip. Is it artistry, or mere science? Perhaps one day we'll be able to automatically sift through footage to discard what's clearly too blurry, shaky, and highlight clips where people are, say, smiling and laughing and looking at the camera. I see it as more of a clip sorting tool, eventually, not so much a fully automated workflow.

Have you looked at the magic iMovie function? Or maybe just import your clips to iMovie and select a bunch at random to throw in the timeline (not that far removed from the automated process)?

But to answer your question, the only company I'm aware of that actually produces muvee-like software is indeed muvee (pretty sure all of the "clones" are literally just a rebranding of the same code) so unless they themselves make a Mac version (or you run it in Boot Camp) I don't think you'll find anything that's exactly the same.
 
Thank you so much notjustjay for the reply.

I didn't try magic movie since I just got my Mac and imovie 08 doesn't have magic movie. I will download imovie 06 and try it. But from what I read I don't think it will help too much. I think I will install Parallels and Windows and Muvee and play with that.

I have used Pinnacle's SmartMovie and I thought the idea was very cool. I am a mathematician and I work on machine learning applications so I think the idea of these types of software is very interesting. I don't believe you can ever get a machine to replace a human in these areas but some things can be done automatically and the result is good enough for what I want right now. I really like your idea of this type of software being used for some things like scene selection.

I had several minutes of video of my 1 week old baby sleeping and SmartMovie it pulled out the one second where he smiled in his sleep. And it synched that smile up with the music! It also did some image stabilization and lightened up some of the low-light scenes. But what I really liked and what I can't do myself it synching the video to the music. Plus, right now I don't have time to devote to anything other than work and the baby.

But after using Pinnacle and then using iMovie 08, I really appreciate iMovie. Pinnacle used to crash all the time, take forever to render, and it was so hard to do what you wanted. iMovie is beautiful and I'm really looking forward to using it when I have the time to do the editing myself.
 
I think there are definitely areas where automated workflows will be able to remove some of the drudgery from video editing. I could see applications almost immediately where software could analyze a clip and determine that it's: too shaky, too blurry, too dark or light (and apply the appropriate filters). Facial recognition could look for things like your baby smiling, and automatically set clip in/out points "nearby". Music can be analyzed to determine beat structure and anchor points could be added to a timeline at the same points to help you synch your video to the beat.

Even to do a basic imitation of muvee, I could see someone creating a generic template for commonly used video genres, like music videos, slide shows, etc. The good ol' cheezy effects and cuts could be right there, ready to go, and all the user would have to do is drop things into zones, much like setting up a menu in iDVD. Do a little time scaling based on the length of the desired music track, shift a bit to match the beat and bam, instant movie. :)

I studied machine learning (and data mining) in grad school, so I'm not completely unfamiliar with what's out there, though I would hardly call myself a mathematician :p Still, the technology is brimming with potential!

Yeah, definitely grab iMovie '06 along with the '08 version. I admit I haven't actually tried '08 yet.

Sorry the solution you look for isn't exactly out there yet, but who knows...

And congrats on the baby!
 
Valid request elh

I recently moved from Windows to Mac myself and have two young boys (2 and 1). I, too, previously enjoyed the ease of muvee's 'automatic video editing' to produce a 2-3 minute music video quickly. I have searched but have not found an equivalent product for mac.
 
Where did the magic go?

Found this thread looking for exactly the same features as the OP. I got a 10pm request :eek: for a video of the photos I took of my son's swim team this season, for use at their end of year party today. While it would have been nice to go through and reduce the pool of 989 photos to about 300, I didn't want to be up all night.

I never used the Magic iMovie in the older versions, but iDVD 2008 has a "Magic iDVD" with some basic capabilities. You can drop a bunch of images into it and drop one or more songs on top of the stack of images then create the project. You can then change the slideshow it created to be the length of the audio. If you use transitions between photos, you'll need a minimum of about 3 sec/photo of audio for it to match them up, otherwise the video runs longer than the audio.

The big disappointment was that there was not beat matching to make it more interesting than a constant flip of images. That's what got me looking today. For my use with lots of images, some popping by quickly isn't a big deal on some of them, and it's easy to match stills to a beat.

I haven't tried the "Magic" with video, though doing some kind of matching for video clips would be pretty sweet, even if it wasn't all that accurate about finding something "interesting" to match to.
 
Does . . . not . . . compute . . .

My wife and I are expecting our first, in about four weeks' time.

Having read this newly resurrected thread, I now look forward to wishing I, too, were a drone, once I become parental.

Burr . . . Click . . . Chase baby . . . Edit clips . . . Beep . . . Power down . . .
 
Not as of now

Hey there, i contacted the creators from Muvee and they said that so far they dont intend to make the same software macs.

What i would suggest is for you to use the "Vmware" instead of parallel, becuase the files you create on the windows side will be available on the mac Hard-drive (at least thats what one of the apple personnel said). or you may use parallel if you already own it and upload the file to Mobile-me...or just put it on a thumb-drive.

I know some people have made some nonsense comments about your question. But dont pay any attention to them, i know how cool Muvee is...

one last thing, you may get the same results with imovie as muvee...if you have the latest version of imovie, just select 4 -8 secs of your footage and add different transitions to the project, its very easy to fit your music to the whole movie...the end result is pretty close, however faster, you dont have to wait for muvee to render the file. Go to youtube and search for "extorsys" then look for the Snowboarding trip video.
 
iPhoto

I’m also one of many who were used to Muvee and changed to Mac.
I found out that iPhoto has something similar.
Steps:
1.- Open iPhoto.
2.- Import your photos.
3.- Select the photos and create a Slideshow.
4.- Select transition and click Ken Burns effect on. Then choose a song.
5.- You can either select the time of each photo to be displayed (and the song to be replayed) or select to auto—adjust the time depending on the song length.
6.- Once finished, export the slideshow.

It will create a .mov file that you can play in Quicktime.

As simple as that. It is not Muvee, but you will have a very decent movie made out of your photos in just minutes.
 
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