7.1 Introduction

The structure of a muvee is very similar to the timeline structure provided by manual video editing software such as Apple’s iMovie and Microsoft Movie Maker. You can place clips in a timeline, apply effects to these clips or to the whole video, add a sound track, etc. and muvee Reveal’s timeline structure can do all that.

There are some crucial differences though, the most important being that many aspects of the composition such as determining the durations of clips to put into the timeline happen automatically in muvee Reveal. Also, the terms effects and transitions mean much more within a muvee style than it does in common manual video editors. We focus on the effect framework here.

In Windows Movie Maker, for example, you can apply an effect (say “black and white”) to a segment of video and it’ll show up in black and white. It affects no other segment. The effect also usually has no relationship to, say, the music track. You have to tell it when to start and when to end. The kind of effects that you can compose in a muvee style are far from being that rigid. muvee effects can respond to the music track, to the type of input material, come in a sequence, or go to any kind of customization that you as a style author care to get into.

The key to this flexibility is the effect composition framework we provide for style authors. The framework lets you combine primitive effects in a number of ways to achieve great variety.

7.1.1 Terminology

An effect can be thought of as an instruction to modify its inputs in a specific way during a specific time interval of its presentation. Here we usually use the term effect to refer to both the specification of an effect as well as the instances of the specification. The distinction between an effect specification and an effect instance will be highlighted where necessary.