I was working on a few home video projects and though it would be cool to create a little montage for each DVD. Let’s face it. Sometimes home movies can be a little boring.

Anyhoo there is a program that cam with my HP PC called muvee autoProducer

It could not be simpler to create a video montage set to your favorite songs. You basically choose a video clip, choose a song and then choose a style. That’s it. In minutes you have a very slick looking montage.

The program comes with with different styles which modify the fades cuts and effects to certain moods. For example they have a “music video style” which is great to create montages with quicj cuts and MTV style effects. They also have more laid back style perfect for everything from wedding to sporting events.

In addition to vidoes you can import still pictures to create very cool picture slide shows. Again Muvee will create all kinds of great effects to really bring still images to life.

You can output your finished Muvee in just about any video format.

This program is a huge timesaver. To create something like this in a regular video editor would take hours.

Click here for a FREE trial of muvee autoProducer

I just wanted to pass on my experience with Ulead DVD Moviefactory 5. Although the software has a very “wizard” interface it’s a surprisingly powerful application. For one thing it can encode audio in AC3, which will save space so you can encode your video at a higher bitrate.

Version 5 now allows you to encode with two-pass VBR.

Another feature which I seem to have discovered lately is that it will import DVD’s and allow you to do multi-trims, create menus and author all without re-encoding the video files.

ABout the only bug I have discoverd is that it doesn’t quite save projects correctly. You need to save your menu as template if you ever want to use it again.

As I mentioned a couple posts back I went out to my local Wallyworld and picked up the Polaroid DRM-2001G DVD Recorder. I paid $219.

I haven’t fully tested it but so far I’m pretty impressed especially for the price. It has an 80G hard drive. It does a very nice job of recording and I do find the hard drive to be handy. The remote is a little confusing but once you get the hang of it it’s not too bad.

I’ve transfered some Home Video VHS tapes from a VCR through the composite inputs.

How were the results ?

My family commented that the recordings looked better than the original VHS tapes. As a matter of fact the final DVD’s look better than DVD’s I’ve made when going from a VCR, through a DV camera with pass-through to convert to DV-AVI.

In the HQ (1 hour mode) the recorder encodes at 9Mbs. The YesDVD feature is actually pretty cool. I think some people will find it quite useful.

I have been using the unit a lot in the past few weeks and I will post a complete review soon.

The Pioneer DVR-640H-S DVD Recorder is becoming widely available. It is the only DVD recorder in the current Pioneer lineup.

This is a great machine for someone looking to use the machine as a VCR. It’s too bad there’s no firewire input for digital camcorders, no video component input and no HDMI output with upconversion.

If you’re looking for a machine primarily to transfer tapes there are better choices like the anticipated JVC DR-M101S.