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Having taken the world by storm with its revolutionary automatic video production software, home-grown company muvee Technologies is gearing up to raise the bar even higher.
First, there was the "simply point and shoot" technology that turned the everyday person-on-the-street into competent photographers.
Then came Pete Kellock and Terence Swee, co-founders of muvee Technologies, who took things a step further with an exciting innovation that could very well make moviemakers of the masses. Say hello to muvee autoProducer, the world's first instant personal video software that transforms raw video footage into quality finished productions with just the touch of a few buttons. Not surprisingly, this exciting flagship product of the Singapore-based muvee Technologies has quickly established itself as a must-have item for anyone who enjoys recording life's many moments, but who never actually gets around to editing the material.
Targeted mainly at this "casual video production" market, muvee autoProducer takes an entirely new approach to traditional "non-linear" video editing by replacing old software conventions like timelines, transitions lists and dragging clips with a revolutionary technology injected with encoded rules of professional editing. "Shooting video is always great fun, but editing that material can be a very frustrating and tedious experience," explained Kellock. "People are now used to pointing and clicking with a camera and getting superb results immediately. They want video editing which is just as quick and easy."
And it doesn't get easier than this. Simply pick the video files you want to include, select your choice of music and production style and click "make muvee". The software then analyses the video for features like poor quality material, shot boundaries, face detection, as well as the tempo, beats and rhythm of the music before intelligently incorporating all the elements together. And voila, a perfectly edited, quality production you can email to friends, post on the web or turn into video compact discs to use with a DVD player. What's more, the whole production process is often thousands of times faster than other traditional video editing software. For example, 10 hours of painstaking work is typically reduced to about five seconds, revealed Kellock.
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Currently, the product has a huge market base with online sales in more than 75 countries. muvee's major commercial partners include such heavyweights as Hewlett-Packard, Sony and Nokia. For its amazing achievement, muvee has also garnered numerous accolades, including PC Magazine's "Best of 2003" and the prestigious Most Innovative Infocomm Product/Service award by the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore. The award, said Kellock, "has been a great boost to our very dedicated team and proves that Singaporean companies can lead the way in developing world class innovations which target a global market."
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LOCAL COMPANY, GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES
The global market has always been a key area in muvee's growth strategy - right from the beginning. "Our greatest area of focus - and probably the single biggest challenge - was international sales: securing the first large deals with major international companies," recalled Kellock of the early days, "We believed that this was the most essential piece of the puzzle."
The concept for their innovative flagship PC product had actually originated in 1999. Kellock, Swee and their team were then working on video and audio analysis in Kent Ridge Digital Labs (now 12R incubator). For over 10 years there had been great R&D interest in this field but the focus was on trying to make software "understand" the content of the video, said Kellock. The team hit the jackpot when they bucked this trend and turned their attention primarily to automating the way a video production is pieced together and made to look professional. "Our whole philosophy, in almost everything we do is, 'if everyone else is looking here, we'll look there'," explained Kellock, "invention is at our very core."
HOOKED ON INNOVATION
This pioneering attitude has worked well for muvee so far. The company has three patents filed in Singapore, Japan, US and Europe. In addition, muvee recently developed a ground-breaking version of its software for the mobile phone platform. Called Movie Director, this application is currently available on the recently-launched Nokia 7610 and enables users, for the first time, to turn video clips captured with their 7610 camera phone into personal "muvees" by styling them with special effects as well as music and text. Movie Director automatically combines multiple video clips into a single video vignette or optimises the edited videos for MMS sending. "This is our first product for a mobile platform," said Kellock, "it was a huge technical challenge to get such processor-intensive software running on a phone processor, but we have done it." According to Kellock, the Movie Director now best embodies the unique muvee concept of "shoot some video, click a few buttons, and in under a minute you have a finished production ready to share on the phone or send to friends".
muvee's production styles portfolio has also been enhanced. "We originally started with 24 styles for our PC software. Today we have 60," said Kellock, "Before the end of this year we will have more than 100 for the PC and 100 for the camera phone."
HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS
Riding on its phenomenal success around the world, muvee recently established a sales presence in the US and is currently planning to set up a development office in India. Still, Kellock insists that "the core of the company will probably always be here". Reasons for this decision include Singapore's "effective pragmatic help" from governmental bodies, as well as its "business-friendly" and "tech savvy" environment. Kellock also considers the Lion City's ability to attract the best people from around the region as a major plus. "We have carefully built a team of amazing people with the unusual set of skills we need," he explained, "they come from Singapore, China, India and the West but are based here. This mix would be very hard to duplicate in other countries, and is something that forms a considerable entry barrier to our competition."
So what's next for this enterprising company? "We want to embed muvee functionality into the firmware of DVD recorders, personal video recorders and other similar consumer devices," said Kellock, "muvee is already in the PC and in the camera phone; now we want to get into the living room."
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"[The award] has been a great boost to our very dedicated team and proves that Singaporean companies can lead the way in developing world class innovations which target a global market."
- Pete Kellock, Co-founder, muvee Technologies
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