Movavi EnhanceMovie: Turn Amateurish Videos into Cool Masterpieces

You never know how your video will turn out when you’re shooting. You may end up with a video which is too dark, overexposed or with a wrong white balance, among others.

The good news is you don’t need expensive software and sophisticated training to fix these problems. You only need a program like Movavi’s EnhanceMovie, which is easy to use and easy on your pocket as well.

EnhanceMovie has such a `childish’ interface that at first sight you may think it’s some program for children fun activity, what with the colorful magic wand in the middle of the screen.

Anyway, if you’re beginner, it’s a good thing because you get don’t get intimidated by a complex or sophisticated interface.

It’s a good idea for the interface to open in this manner especially for beginners who don’t have to be confused by items in a drop down menu.

The other useful feature is the black space below where there’s a `Drag and Drop Video Files Here’ prompt. The program certainly leaves no room for guesswork.

Your eyes can’t escape the large icons to your right – Add Video and Capture.

If your video footage is in your camera, you can click on the Capture icon. A capture dialog box opens open up and if you’ve hooked up your Web camera or DV camera, then you can start capturing video.

Alternatively, if you already have a video file ready, you can click on the Add Video icon.

The moment you add a file, the two large icons disappear and the space is taken up by the video file you’ve imported.

At the bottom of you clips will be three buttons – Clips, Transitions and Effects.

Adding transitions is a breeze. You would just have to select the preferred transition and drag it in between two clips.

As for effects you can apply one by simply dragging and dropping an effect over your clip.

If you want only a portion of your clip to be affected, you can set the range using the two sliders at the bottom of the video preview window. Move the video seek bar to the desired start position and click `Set the Left Marker’ button. Set the end position and click `Set the Right Marker’ button.

To use the Transitions and Effects buttons you would have to first drag a clip into the storyboard panel.

Sliders pop up at the bottom of the Effects panel when you select an effect. You can use them to set your preferred levels.

If you don’t want to spend time tinkering with the sliders (can be testing for beginners), you can select the automatic adjustment modes in the form of MagicEnhance, AutoContrast, AutoSaturation and AutoWhiteBalance.

If your footage is really bad, these automatic modes can, with a single click of the mouse, improve the quality of your clips dramatically.

The cool feature here is, the moment you click on effect you can see a preview of the change or improvement in the video monitor. The effect, however, is not added to the clip until you drag it into the storyboard panel.

What if you want to remove a effect from a clip? All you have to do is right click on the clip and delete the effect.

When you’re done with adding effects, you head to the Share button. You can output your video either to Devices or Video File.

Under Devices you have options for iPod, Sony PSP, Playstation and Creative Zen, among others – each with its own presets.

Under Video File you have AVI, MPEG1/2, MP4, 3GP and MOV, among others with different presets to suit your needs. There’s no option DV AVI though.

I tried adding the sepia effect to a portion of a clip, thinking that only that portion will play in sepia and the rest in colour in the final output. I was wrong.

Only the selected portion was rendered and produced as a video file, leaving the rest out. Of course a watermark appeared on the video. It will be there until you buy an activation code for USS39.90.

You can trim and join clips easily in EnhanceMovie, but don’t expect any facility for audio editing. So, don’t expect to add your favourite soundtrack to your video project in EnhanceMovie although the developer calls itself a video editing program.

Just because there’s the DV capture option, don’t expect to copy your edited footage back to your camera tape.

If you already have a video editing program, you’ll have most of the effects and transitions provided in EnhanceMovie.

However, if you just want to enhance your video without any editing, then this is the program for you. It will save you the cost of buying a video editing program and the time you would have to spend to learn the ropes.