Muvees

One of the most fun bits of the Movie Director application on Symbian phones such as the N73 is the ability to make Muvees, micromovies that can be compressed into a multimedia message (MMS) and sent to your friends' phones just like a text.
To make a Muvee, select a video or image in the Gallery, click Edit and go to Create muvee. It will list a number of styles, ready-made edgings and background music to create various moods from Funsterish to Serenity. Then you can add text at the beginning and end, and merge in still images and other videos.
Press Create Muvee and a few seconds later, it is ready for transmission. Once you have found your way round the menus, Muvees can be run up in minutes.
To show what a Muvee looks like, I created one from the video of Gerty Guineapig. In fact, it is a Gerty Muvee (say that out loud).
The quality is...what camera makers call 'fun', ie total pants, but if grandmum gets a Muvee of grandkids playing on the beach, is she going to complain? She'll alter her will in their favour directly.
Longer, better quality Muvees can also be created but they must be transmitted by email, Bluetooth, web upload or WiFi if you have it.

Video on the N73

Most cameraphones produce pretty rubbish videos, but the N73 uses MPEG4, the latest standard using very advanced compression so reasonable quality videos can be made without filling up the memory card for 30 seconds of your children trampolining or whatever, but showable on the computer screen without too much embarrassment.

For test purposes, I took a silly video of our family guineapig and uploaded it to MySpace. Here's a snapshot taken from it - one of the nice editing functions of the N73, particularly useful as Blogger won't let me upload videos directly to the blog.
The quality is really rather good - I had to endure much, much worse when Mr Bloke with the House in the South of France forced us to watch his holiday home movies when I was a kid.
Editing the video on the phone was a bit fiddly but not difficult. Cutting the video was awkward - the instructions say to click on the start and finish points and then click 'cut', without explaining that the section between the points is retained, and the rest is cut. Not obvious, but having realised that the process of cutting the video was simple.
The instructions also fail to point out that you have to add titles and credits after you have made the cuts, as they are removed in the process.
Despite these quibbles, the editing is simple and it is clearly possible to get results easily good enough for U-Tube.
You can also add a sound track or background music, but I haven't worked out how yet. More tests and a new silly video tomorrow.