muveeMix

Entry Date: March 5th, 2007

Mix Master Tip: It’s all about the style

“What style should I choose?” - the all too familiar question that folks always ask when they hit the ‘Select a style’ page of their muvee making process. Hence, I figured the best person to answer this is the one who eats and sleeps with them, the Style Director! Her name’s Karen and here are some tips from the guru’s mouth.

Urban:
Get your blood pumping with Urban muveeStyle! We designed it for the adrenalin junkie in you! Oh yeah… Its great for those skateboarding, skydiving, bike racing, break dancing, snowboarding…etc photos/videos that you’ve been collecting! Next, add your favorite song that gets your booty shakin’… and trust me… your muvee is gonna rock the house down. *sizzle sizzle drizzle*

Recommended no. of photos: 30 to 40 photo Recommended amount of video: 5mins

Smoky:
Time to get seriously sentimental with this muveeStyle. Its classy, slow, its black and white, its all about milking the most out of those emotional moments.

Use this style with all of your most sentimental moments, like special birthday parties, weddings, graduation ceremonies… you get the idea…

*Have those hankies on standby. We’re gonna make your mothers weep.

Recommended no. of photos: 15 to 25 photos

Recommended amount of video: 3mins

Recommended music: Try classical music for a change muveeMakers. Mozart or Paganini is an absolute gem with this style.

…to be continued. It’s end day and all forms of witty style descriptions seemed to have eluded her. So yeah..stay tuned.

Updated: March 12th, 2007

Alright, the guru’s back with tips on 3 other styles…

Over-the-Top Music Video
Watch this style! And you’’re an instant music video extraordinaire! Please use and abuse this off-the-wall muveeStyle with its fast cuts and flashes! Fractal effects and fluid transitions!

This style works well with photos, but it works wonders with video! Definitely use music with a fast, solid, thumping beat!

Recommended no. of Photos: 30-40
Recommended amount of video: 5mins

Classic Sepia
Fancy a bit of nostalgia? Wanna make your video look a funky kitsch? Try this style on for size. It makes your muvee all grainy and sepia (just like those movies in the 1950s)! Oh yeah… vaudeville, here we come! Think… Charlie Chaplin folks!

Best to use some clangy piano tunes!
Recommended no. of Photos: 25-30
Recommended amount of video: 3mins or more

Action
It’s contemporary. It’s cool. And it’s stylish. Vertical lines never looked soooo good… J We’ll move your photos… a little over here… and a little over there… spin your videos left and right, and voila! Here’s a slick little muveeStyle for you.

Almost any type of music works with this style… so express yourself! Try a cool jazzy number, some lounge music perhaps? Or is bossa nova more your cuppa tea?

Recommended no. of Photos: 20- 25
Recommended amount of video: 2mins

Entry Date: February 5th, 2007

Windows Live Spaces embed

Bloggers on Windows Live Spaces have been rejoicing over the past week when the Spaces team announced the long awaited feature to embed videos directly into blog entries.

But to the disappointment of some of you here, Spaces seems to block muveeMix embed codes. I can’t say what’s up with it yet until Spaces come back with advice on how to fix this. I’m delighted, however, that they replied this morning with assurance they are on it.

“We have a white list of providers for security purposes – looks like you guys aren’t yet on the list. I will look into it.”

In the meantime, I wanna thank Scøtt, for adding support in his video plug-in for muveeMix videos in Windows Live Writer. The video plug-in will work for muveeMix once we get our codes ‘unblocked’.

So hang in there folks while we do our best to bring the joy of sharing on Spaces to you.

Entry Date: January 16th, 2007

Limelight Networks supplies CDN

We’re very proud to announce the immediate upgrade of our muveeMix network architecture. Thanks to the guys from Limelight Networks your muvees are now served via our CDN. This will bring your productions one step closer to the target audience so that they can enjoy them without the usual jitter caused by network latency.

The news report on Limelight’s website has the following to say:

“Optimized for high-performance delivery of vast amounts of rich media, Limelight Networks enables muvee to quickly and reliably respond to high user demand for its software and new online video mixing service as consumers embrace its innovative new video technology.”

For example, imagine that someone in Europe watches your muvee; at the same time, this muvee will be transferred to a server closest to that visitor. When more people around that area watch your muvee they don’t have to download it from our server directly; instead they can download it from its cached location on the CDN.
This feature doesn’t increase the upload speed to our website when you’re sending photos and videos across. Nevertheless, we hope you’ll be happy with this network improvement, and in the meantime we’ll be working behind the scenes to make your experience with muveeMix as positive as possible.

Entry Date: December 27th, 2006

Service disruptions on Wed, 27th December 2006

Due to earthquakes off Taiwan this Wednesday, our service is facing severe delays in video creation. Communication between the website (hosted in the USA) and our video creation service (hosted in Singapore) is starting to become more stable, but it will probably take one more day to fully recover.

In the meantime we’ll do our best to process the queued videos as soon as possible.

Update: 3rd of January 2007

Happy new year!! Our service has been restored to its full capacity. The quake affected three major Asian networks, which resulted in extremely high volumes of traffic on the still functional lines. After 48 hours we were still experiencing network problems, but those quickly subsided to tolerable levels.

In cases like this it’s easy to forget who the true victims of this incident are. It goes without saying that we feel for all the earthquake victims and may they and their families quickly recover and share the happiness of the new year.

Entry Date: December 19th, 2006

What’s cooking?

It’s been a while since our last update. We’re aiming to have one more refresh before Christmas to fix some of the reported issues and other glitches.

But we’re not stopping there. So what’s in store for next year? Some features we’re currently exploring are:

• Upload to YouTube support - I’m currently working with the development team from YouTube and we’re making good progress; we expect to have this feature in by Q1 2007
• Better quality videos - all this time we’re making you wait for your video, and the result aren’t always that impressive. Instead of trying to eliminate the waiting time, why not produce videos that are more stunning?
• Faster download times - we’re working together with our CDN provider to distribute your videos across the globe for faster access by your friends or families overseas.

The above are just technical features and improvements; on top of this we’re also improving the user interface to make online video creation a breeze!

Until the next wassup!

Entry Date: December 3rd, 2006

Hotmail thinks muveeMix emails are junk

As you may know, our service requires registration via an activation system. We send out an email upon registration to make sure the specified email address is (still) in use. After clicking the activation link within the email, the user is activated and no further action is required.

Recently, we’ve noticed that many activation e-mails were never opened, primarily by Hotmail users. To find out why this happens, I used my own Hotmail account to register at muveeMix. At that point I noticed that the activation email went straight to the Junk folder instead of the regular mail box. Since then, I’ve been into discussions with Microsoft Email Delivery Support to find out what’s wrong with our emails.

So far we’ve increased the reputability of our mail server by adding SPF and DomainKeys, which works for both Gmail and Yahoo! (Gmail actually supports both of these frameworks), but so far we haven’t been successful to pass through Microsoft’s SmartScreen™ process. One interesting response I’ve gotten was “Your email looks like spam, but we can’t tell you why as this would render our scanner useless”; good point

In any case, this case is under further investigation and I hope to update you soon on any signs of success.

Update: 04-Dec-2006

Hotmail came back to us saying that our domain has been added to their SenderID program; after two working days the changes should be propagated through their network. In hopeful joy we wait

Update: 07-Dec-2006

Our prayers have been answered! All those sleepless nights have come to an end! Our emails are now accepted on Hotmail accounts as being reputable. Their explanation:

“The deliverability issues on your IP address were based on negative filter verdicts and/or other IP reputation problems”

This is a good lesson to learn for all who are setting up a dedicated host on a recycled IP address

Entry Date: November 19th, 2006

Ash – your fairy godmother to a free bumper account

Just in case you are wondering who is Ash in our new “Tell Ash about this muvee” feature; I figured that yours truly should first introduce myself. I am Ash, the marketing communications owner for muveeMix.

We believe that kick-ass muvees should be shared with everyone and are eager to spice up our blog with your cool creations. The search is on for muveeStars, so remember to “Tell Ash” the next time you make that muvee and you might just see it featured on the blog. This also sets the fairy godmother to work and you’ll find your account expanded to store 50 muvees and have 5 extra styles to play with!

Till then, may awesome videos be with you!

Entry Date: November 17th, 2006

minor updates to muveeMix

Here is the first technical update post. You can expect to see more such posts as we add features and fixes to make muveeMix a better experience for you. What this week’s update brings:

• First of all, a link to this blog in the main interface so you can find us
• Heavy dieting: we shed over 100KB of file size and muveeMix should now load faster
• We are happy to provide 2 additional music tracks for your muvees: “Chill Out” and “Teen Rock”
• You can now send a specific muvee to your friends (from the player page)
• You can send now a specific muvee to Ash (from the player page). If she likes it, it may become the weekly featured muvee on this blog. (More about that in a future post.)

Entry Date: November 8th, 2006

A short introduction

Since this is my first post in the Wassup! category, let me introduce myself. My name is Tjerk (for all who are not Dutch, it’s pronounced as Jack) and I’m the lead developer for muveeMix.

The idea behind the service is to allow users to create their own short personal videos from raw footage, music and pictures. The result, called a muvee, can then be embedded in your blog or shared with your friends via email. The service comes free of charge (for limited accounts), though registration is required.

We’ve started this project somewhere around August 2006 and a first version was made available roughly 6 weeks later, a hectic yet rewarding period. After the initial launch we continued to improve the user experience by speeding up some of the processes. Naturally we’d love to hear from you, the users, what features could make this service the coolest thing on earth!

That’s all for now, until the next Wassup!