Roxio Videowave 5

Our review copy of Videowave still said MGI on the box, but MGI was bought by Roxio last year, hence the name Roxio Videowave 5. The name may have changed, but the interface looks much the same as it has since version 3.

As with most home video-editing applications, there's a storyboard area (here called the storyline) for assembling clips and adding transitions, a viewscreen and a library window that holds clips and other media. Running down the left side of the screen a mode selector toggles through the various editing functions - capture, transitions, audio and special effects - and tools for them appear at the bottom of the screen.

Unusually, the capture function can be used to grab audio from a CD as well as for analogue and DV capture. One of the new features of the capture module is scene detection and, as with Pure Motion's Edit Studio, a file is split into scenes within the application, but remains a single file on the hard drive. Scene detection happens in a dedicated window after the file has been captured.

The software detects changes in image brightness and you can adjust its sensitivity using a slide. It did well on the default setting, though it's a pain first having to capture, then sit through the entire process asecond time while the scene detection does its stuff. Applications that do this in a single process are much more convenient.

Storyboard templates are a simple but useful aid to producing watchable videos. They include wedding, birthday, company overview and field trip and consist of simple text descriptions of each shot in position on the storyline.

Videowave has a good selection of transitions and special effects filters. Transitions are simply placed in the slots between clips on the storyline, simple controls are provided for setting the clip overlap and the results can be previewed in the viewing window.

The preview window preferences provide the option of weighting performance for either real-time playback or fewer dropped frames. In practice you can either see every fourth frame of a transition, or all of them played back at a quarter speed.

The video mixer provides another method of creating transitions and can also be used for picture-in-picture and chromakey effects - transposing one video image with its background removed on top of another. As with most of the effects, animation is achieved by adjusting the settings for the beginning, middle and end of the clip.

You can output your finished project at any time by pressing the Produce video button. Output templates include Mpeg-1 and Mpeg-2 for VCD and DVD production as well as RealAudio and WMV streaming formats and you can create your own customised settings if you feel happy adjusting parameters such as bit rate.

You can author DVDs, from within Videowave, but not directly from the timeline. Pressing the Author DVD button takes you into a separate but integrated authoring application with its own storyline, mode selector and library.

Unlike Ulead's Video Studio, there's no automated arrangement of clips from the timeline into a DVD menu structure and you can't access individual scenes created using Videowave's scene detection, only clips in the library.

So the approach is to first do your editing, then render the timeline either as a DV AVI, or Mpeg-2 file, at which point the new clip is added to the library and you can access it in the DVD authoring application. You can then add chapters - stage points in a clip that you can navigate to using buttons on a domestic DVD remote control.

Although there is a wide selection of backgrounds and button styles, there are no templates - with everything in position ready for you to drop in your clips, so Videowave requires more work than something like Video Studio.

Videowave has a good range of features and you can produce excellent results.

System requirements:

• 500MHz Pentium III processor
• Windows 98SE/2000/Me/XP
• 128MB of Ram
• 110MB of free hard disk space
• 1024 x 768 resolution video display