The Muvizu website is a place to meet fellow creatives and, using our tools, collaborate on projects ranging from movies to theatre and from audio dramas to music. One of our most powerful tools is the Muvizu 3D application, free downloadable PC software that enables anyone to create animated videos without specialist hardware, software or training.

The Muvizu website and 3D application are integrated to allow you to upload your creations and showcase them to site visitors. The website contains other tools to complement your creative efforts. There's a powerful script editor, project areas where you may store your audio, image, video and other files, forums and, to provide feedback, work you publish may be rated and commented on.

A project is a proposal or plan to make a movie, record a play for radio, write a play - whatever. Any member may initiate a project, they then become its owner, and then set about breaking it down into tasks for other people to pick up. For instance, an owner may post a task requesting someone to read a script in a husky voice, or another for someone to edit a script - and so on until all the tasks necessary to produce the movie, drama or whatever are completed. You may start a project by clicking on the "new project" button displayed prominently on the left of pretty much all the pages on the site.

You may contribute to a project without being a member. You may, for instance, add comments and suggestions in the project's forum, or you may pick up a task belonging to any project that has set itself up as being public. If you pick up a task and submit your work, the project owner may invite you to become a member.

When you are running the Muvizu 3D application, it connects to the site in a couple of ways (in subsequent releases this integration will become closer and extend the functionality of the software). At the moment, you may post your finished videos to the Muvizu site from within the application and you will also receive upgrades of the application automatically via the website. You must be online to run Muvizu 3D.

We certainly can help. As it says in the Muvizu 3D terms, we will deal with any commercialisation requests on a case-by-case basis, so email us at this address - contact@muvizu.com - and enter "high-def request" in the subject line. We'll get back to you.

Muvizu 3D is built on the Unreal 3 games engine made by Epic Games and, as yet, there is no Mac version - so, no, Muvizu 3D will not run natively on the Mac platform. That being said, any Mac produced in the last few years uses Intel processors and you may use Mac's Boot Camp to set up a PC partition on your machine on to which you may install and run Muvizu 3D; it performs very well. You may also use a virtualised PC environment using software such as VMware Fusion or Parallels - however, performance via these will be slower and possibly very slow indeed if you create complicated sets with many characters in a scene.

The formats currently accepted are:

Images: JPG, JPEG, BMP, PNG, GIF
Video: 3GP, ASF, DV, WMV, MOV, MP4, MPG, MPG2, MPEG, AVI
Audio: MP3, WAV

max video size: 100 MB
max image size: 500 KB
max audio size: 5 MB

Audio files: MP3, WAV
Video files: AVI
Images: JPG, JPEG, BMP, PNG, GIF
Output format: .set -> Muvizu Set files (your saved scenes), .avi (movie output).

There are no size limits, other than that of the computer's memory. And there is a known issue that if you include big videos or audio in your work, then it may crash on saving the scene. When you use video files for audio, the Muvizu application abandons the video portion of the file and uses only the audio.

Using video files as images will also be dependant on the users machine having the correct codec to process the videos.
Saving video can be done with a user-selectable codec.

Each user can upload and store a maximum of 2GB of data.

Because we have only just launched. The questions here were those most frequently asked by testers and focus groups. Perhaps they were shy. However, you may expand this by asking questions of your own. Direct your queries to comments@muvizu.com and we'll do what we can.