A Match Made For Hollywood: Seagate and muvee
Recently, we’ve covered some movie-making gear- from the camera stabilizer to the camera itself. One thing that we haven’t talked about is the software that puts it all together, which is an oversight that we’re happy to correct today. Sure, there are plenty of movie editing programs out there, and some likely came installed on your computer. But you may have missed one hiding in plain sight on any Seagate FreeAgent hard drive- muvee’s application, Reveal, comes pre-installed on all external drives in the family!
Now, we’ve checked out several of the FreeAgent line before- including right before the software was included last holiday season. The FreeAgent Go line remains our portable drive line of choice, and we still use our FreeAgent Desk every day as a primary backup system. For these tests, we’ve been running on the FreeAgent Go 320GB model, using the drive to store our images, audio, video, and assorted files for our masterpiece in the making. Once we’ve taken our shots, we simply transfer them from the camera to the USB hard drive. The first time we plugged in the drive, we saw the option to install the muvee software, and we only had to wait a few minutes before we could start using the full version of Reveal (an $80 program normally).
Muvee offers a free 15-day trial, should you wish to try your hand at some video editing, though you’ll need a PC and we recommend 2GB of RAM if you’re going to be doing anything serious (like high definition). We don’t have true editing bays, but actually used one of our recently-reviewed tools to speed up our workflow. Once satisfied with our progress, we simply saved the files to the Seagate drive. One of the best parts is that you can easily take the drive over to your media center, where you hopefully have the FreeAgent Theater+. We also reviewed it around the end of the year, but the software has only gotten better- now it supports
Netflix as well as MediaFly access.
Perhaps someday we’ll be able to unveil our magnum opus, but we found ourselves too busy editing, and then noticed that we might need some reshoots, and still haven’t cleared the rights to use the music we want. Anyway, most of the features you’ll need are available- captioning, music trimming, easy import and export to or from a variety of formats including WMV, MOV, H.264, AVI, MP4, AVCHD and more, not to mention music in MP3, WMA, AAC, or WAV and images in JPEG, PNG, BMP, and even TIF. If some of those aren’t familiar or you aren’t sure what files you have, you’re probably safe (except with DRM music perhaps, and more annoyingly to us, RAW images). The lack of RAW support is not so surprising though, and easy to work around.
New users might be a bit confused by some of the layout and options, but a helpful tour can guide you a bit. We found the software quite easy to use- missing a lot of the power of Final Cut to be sure, but it ran smoothly and made things easy to upload to social media sites like Facebook or YouTube. It felt in some ways a bit more like a slideshow-maker, as it seems to be at it’s best when using still images. It’s much simpler to use than Windows Movie Maker in many ways, especially when it comes to styling your video- these are kind of like a complete theme, there are 10 included that change the transitions and backgrounds, even the color, of your film. Options ranged from Vanilla to Kinetic, and were certainly fun to try.
We weren’t so fond of the menu and authoring process and options available, and note that (likely for good reasons) the software cannot read directly from regular video DVDs. Reveal also crashed once or twice on us, but we didn’t face any data loss thanks to their recovery feature. Bottom line: if you’re planning on creating DVDs, you might want to look elsewhere. But for those getting started with video editing and hoping to share theirs online or through the FreeAgent Theater+, this is an attractive and simple option. Best of all, if you need a backup hard drive (and who doesn’t!), you’ll get the full version free on your Seagate FreeAgent, which run from around $70 to $135 depending on size.
