Open Letter to Terence, Pete & Customer Support

[smck9800]

Terrence, Pete & The Reveal Support/Development Team:

I have been an avid, pleased and sometimes frustrated customer over the years -- since AP v3. I have found no other product that offers the breadth and ease of use of your products.

Over the last 6 months, I have been working with your support team to address a major issue where Reveal 8 was unable to complete the rendering process of larger projects using AVCHD (MT2S) clips from my Canon video camera.

The reason for this note is to express my respect for your organization's efforts to work with me -- an individual customer -- over a long period of time with successful results. No other software vendor has provided the level of personal support, accountability and results like I have received from Muvee. Yes it took many months, and some customers may have walked away, but due to the ongoing attempts to help me with the problems, I was happy to stay engaged.


Thank you to the Muvee team and keep up the great work.

Smck
San Diego

[terenceswee]

smck9800,

THANK YOU very much for staying with us and I am glad that the efforts of Yih Yeong and his customer support team backed by our engineering and QA groups were not in vain.

Every single day at muvee, a bunch of us come in to the office to make the best products we know how, and help our customers get the most out of it. However, video editing on the PC is a highly complex space; with a myriad of cameras, codecs, formats, hardware specs and driver issues...much less automating so many aspects of it. We are committed to getting to the other side of complexity and with supportive users like yourself, we know we will.

Your open letter/post means ALOT to us at muvee. Thank you very much.

best regards,
Terence Swee / Founder

[metta]

This feedback means a lot to me, too, as newbie who has just now downloaded the software on a trial basis. It is very encouraging to see this kind of customer satisfaction and dedicated customer support!

With appreciation,
Metta

[yihyeong]

Thanks Metta. Have fun with muvee! Hope to see some muvees from you soon.

[rcjstl]

I am new to Muvee, but an avid video application pro from MAC to PC and have worked with all types of file formats and software programs.

I wanted to post some feedback about my experience with the Muvee purchase and product. I have a new Vixia HF S21. I download the trial version of Muvee to see what it could do with the AVCHD files. I was not able to work with the files until I "purchased" the program (Order Number: 205137298, 12/13/2010). After the purchase, I was able to see the AVCHD files but was disappointed when it took 8-13 minutes to "process" each 2-4 minute clip, just to preview them. I assembled 20 HD clips for a 50 minute Muvee. To preview the Muvee, the program took a well over 2 hours. Once the preview was accomplished, changes to the Muvee were fast and easy to accomplish. I started the Save (rendering) process at 11:51pm last night and as of 6:53am this morning, the rendering process was only 47% complete.

The Pixela program that comes with the Canon is un-friendly and has no creative options, BUT it was able render that same material in less than 2 hours to an HD DVD.

I have uploaded screen shots of the temp file status, the Muvee screen status, and my PC specs. Note: MY PC has solid-state hard drives with plenty of space; therefore it is as fast as it gets for writing/reading files.

Overall, I think your program has potential but something needs to be done about AVCHD. It almost feels as if someone else wrote that code on top of what you normally do and it is terribly inadequate. I think you should warn new users about the problems and you should allow the AVCHD add on to be accessible to trial users.

Respectfully submitted... You are welcome to call me or email me directly (use my order number as the reference).

[terenceswee]

Dear rcjstl,

Thank you very much for using muvee Reveal, and for taking the time to give us an opportunity to address these issues that you are facing. I shall attempt to summarize them:

1) No AVCHD during trial.
AVCHD files consists of a video track which is encoded in H264 Main Profile and an Audio track (the video soundtrack) which is encoded in AC3. In order to decode AC3, we need to pay Dolby patent fees of about USD$1, AND we also need to license AC3 decoders which incurs another fee. Whilst most companies allows a reasonable "trial period" where they will not charge royalties, Dolby does not, hence there is no way we can support AC3 during the trial period (unless we charged something for a trial).

2) Taking 8-13minutes to process each AVCHD file before preview
Before we can do anything with your video files, we need to analyze them. This process includes detection of faces, motion analysis (are these jerky shots, steady shots, panning?) and scene boundary detections (the points where you hit the pause button before recording and point to another video segment). As you can imagine, a full 1080p HD file will take very long to process. In fact, you might be interested to know that 95% of that time is spent decoding the file so that we can look at the pixels. Looking at pixels to look for scene breaks and faces is super fast! H264 is a highly complex but efficient format, and hence whilst it gives great quality per MB of file space it needs, it also means its so tightly wound together, it takes a long time to decode.

3) Assembling 20HD clips for a 50 minute muvee. To preview, it took 2hrs.
Firstly, we were never designed to make 50 minute long short films, but I am glad it worked for you. To generate a preview of your muvee, muvee's patented engine does several things: it analyzes the music tracks that you have chosen, and then respecting the Style that you have chosen, it will construct a movie consisting of pieces of your videos (which pieces gets used/dropped depends on that analysis done, which I mentioned above) It then places effects and transitions on the beat of the music tracks, and also follows the contours of the emotional index of your music: whether its fast paced and energetic or its a slow romantic bossa. In the film/TV/trailer/Ad industry, an accepted norm is that a professional editor will typically take an hour for every minute or two of output. For complex productions with loads of effects, cuts and pans, its more like an hour per minute (ever wondered why trailers are so short?) ...That means your 50min production would have taken you probably 25-50hours to do manually with a powerful manual video editing product like Final Cut Pro, or Adobe Premiere. Loads are going on to make that movie magic that our users have come to expect of every single muvee that our software spits out...and muvee-magic takes time.

4) Pixela takes just 2hrs to render the same content to a HD-DVD
Thats not comparing apples to apples. As I explained in #3, we automatically add effects and transitions, and like you have mentioned, is more "creative". Let me explain: What pixela is doing (I assume) is transcoding your AVCHD files and maybe stringing them together, with simple fades or cuts in between video segments, and then *transcoding* (ie: saving in a different format) to suit the format needed by the HD-DVD medium. Thats not doing very much. A simple example: if we had to make your production entirely sepia toned, with films scratches et al. That means every single 1080p frame of pixels needs to be altered, and then encoded. Thats ALOT of pixels. (30 FPS x 1980 x 1080 x 50min x 60secs = 192Billion pixels to alter!...ok, sorry for the geek-out)

An analogy I like to use:
If you start with a slab of beef. muvee would take a look at it, and carve the best part, removing just enough fat and tendons. We then dry it, age it, marinate it, age it some more, then carefully broil it to give you the best filet mignon, along with creamed spinach and a 1965 Bordeaux on the side. What a software like Pixela is doing is to put that slab into the grinder, and make identical patties of hamburger, stack 'em up, and ship them to McDonalds to be flipped.

Which do you prefer to put your precious memories through: a meat grinder, or the 5 star steak house?

Terence Swee
Founder & CEO of muvee

[rcjstl]

Mr. Swee:

Thank you for the thoughtful reply.

I was never given the impression by the Muvee web site/marketing information that you frowned on making movies of any specific length.

Based on the original posted from this thread, you have been working on the limitations for many months. I still think that your web site should have a cautionary note to prospective users about AVCHD movie processing.

You might consider an option to pre-process all the videos in a selection so the user could step away for a few hours, rather than having to wait for the individual segments to be processed based on a preview selection.

To go back to your analogy, every night cannot be steak night!. Millions of people frequent McDonalds every year. Their market cap is $81Billion, sales of $21 Billion, and EBITDA of $8.45B. The person with the steak house only dreams of being that successful. That means that their suppliers also do well selling something that appeals to a large audience.

FYI.. I have agreed to work with your support team and supply information, files, logs, etc. If you could get Muvee to work better with the Canon AVCHD files, I could connect you with the top brass at Canon to suggest a better experience for their users and bundle Muvee with their AVCHD camcorders and DSLR cameras. Selling more themes (would you like fries with that burger?) to millions of be users would be a good business. Feel free to call if you want to discuss this.

[mytfun]

I'd also be very keen to find out if anyone is having success with Canon AVCHD files and Muvee Reveal.

I've recently purchased Muvee Reveal (after using AutoProducer for my old videos) and a Canon HF M31 HD video camera.

I've only done some initial testing, but when I found it took 12 hours, 45 mins to save a WMV-HD format file consisting of 2 shorts HD clips for a 1min 38sec duration video I realised something is seriously wrong here.

I'll be doing some more testing during the holidays, but keen to hear if anyone has had any success with Canon AVCHD files and Muvee Reveal.

Thanks.

[patrick]

Hi mytfun,

We're sorry to hear that you're having problems with our software. Saving a 1 min over clips seems too long to wait. May we ask you to generate some "logfiles" that hopefully will tell us what's going wrong on your PC and then send them to us? If you're prepared to do this, can you please drop me an email at patrick at muvee dot com. Thanks in advance! And again, my sincere apologies that you're having problems with our product.