Organizing all those photos and videos you’ve collected over the years is one thing, and there are plenty of options to do just that (such as CyberLink's MediaShow 5). But actually turning that amassed media into something people will want to watch—people aside from your easily impressed Uncle Bob, that is—is a completely different story.

Imagine if you could mix and match your best pics and vids of good old Bob in any way you deemed appropriate, add a killer visual presentation that looks ripped right out of Hollywood, top it all off with a song that’s sure to bring a tear to the eye (gag reflexes aside, we think Debbie Boone’s "You Light Up My Life" is a great choice), and then stick it on a disc he can enjoy on his Blu-ray player. And imagine if you could do all that without first enrolling in Media Production 101. Wouldn’t that be cool?

We think it would be, and that’s why we took a good, long look at muvee Technologies’ latest version of its movie-creation software, muvee Reveal 8.

As its $79.99 MSRP suggests, Reveal does not target the high-end of the media-editing spectrum. You shouldn’t expect the millisecond precision of a professional package, for example. Reveal 8’s primary focus is on merging outwardly striking sensory presentations with a convenient creation process, and we think it’s an ideal solution for those who feel budget-level slideshows simply don’t cut it.

Certainly one of Reveal’s most appealing features is its single interface. It’s through this engagingly intuitive screen and its four overlaid windows that you’ll first add files from your PC or camera/camcorder, arrange them to your liking, and even perform mild alterations and split-up video clips. In Reveal’s second window, you’ll choose a “Style” (the general flavor of your finished product, incorporating such factors as transitions, visual effects, and pacing). Ten Styles are available, and you can tailor each to suit your mood or buy more of them from the muvee website.

Window number three, appropriately titled “Music,” is where you’ll grab a few hot tunes from your music library, cut them into snippets, and lay the bedrock of your soundtrack. But before you bask in the glory of your masterpiece, you’ll want to click the “Personalize” button to set the duration, create titles, add voice-overs, and generally tweak all that needs tweaking.

Ah, but it’s what you do after you’ve concocted your multimedia monster that really counts, and Reveal accommodates just about any option. You can save it to your hard drive, burn it on a DVD, plunk it on Uncle Bob’s PSP or iPhone, or, new for version 8, upload it directly to Facebook or YouTube.

Reveal 8 supports most every popular standard- and high-definition format, including WAV, MOV, MPEG 1, MP4, 3GP, WMV-HD, AVC-HD, MOV-HD, and more. But perhaps the best news is the way the latest version of the program deals with outputting files and saving content. (Hint: It utilizes the graphics card.)

For the first time, Reveal taps into NVIDIA’s parallel-processing architecture for GPUs, called CUDA, on supported NVIDIA graphics cards to accelerate the encoding process. While this may not seem like a big deal, think about this: We created a two-minute HD flick, hit the “Save muvee” button, and then sat there and watched our PC rumble and chug for six full minutes to compile our masterpiece and save it to our hard drive. We then instructed the program to use CUDA, and the same process took a mere 60 seconds. No rumbling, no chugging—we were able to use our machine for other duties while it did its thing—and in just one-sixth the time. Nice.

Right now, Reveal only uses CUDA for encoding movies into the popular H.264 compression standard for MPEG-4 files (H.264 is used for Blu-ray, HD DVD, and videos downloaded from the iTunes Store, for example). However, as you can see in the example above, the results are impressive and should only become more so as muvee weaves CUDA support into even more steps in Reveal’s movie-creation pipeline in the future.