VideoWave Movie Creator Review Your Life: The Music Video John P. Mello Jr.
Mon 10/7/02 -- Ever since Apple introduced iMovie, software makers have been trying to give PC users similarly fun and easy ways to edit and produce home movies. The balancing act for developers is to avoid software so simple and feature-skimpy that users will outgrow it before it's out of the box, without pushing the learning curve and frustration factor beyond consumers' patience.
Roxio, familiar to PC multimedia buffs for its Easy CD Creator software, has stepped onto the balance beam with VideoWave Movie Creator, an $80 video-editing package that offers a good mix of sinew and simplicity. (If the name VideoWave rings a bell, it's because Roxio acquired MGI Software earlier this year; Movie Creator adds Roxio's CD- and DVD-burning expertise and other enhancements to what was briefly known as MGI Cinematic.)
MTV for Beginners
VideoWave Movie Creator relies heavily on templates and wizards to simplify the steps of making a movie. As is often the case with "canned" content, some of the templates are corny enough to tar your production as the work of a rank greenhorn; the wizards are helpful devices for learning the program, but can be a barrier to fluid operation after you get the knack of a task.
While Movie Creator offers a manual StoryLine editing mode (more on that in a moment), two other modes or components almost entirely automate the editing process. The first, CineMagic, simply takes a set of video clips and a music track of your choice and creates a music video from them.
You just open CineMagic; name your production; drag some captured video into the CineMagic window; add a music clip; select a style; and let the program spit out a video.
Clips can be imported from a digital camcorder via a FireWire (IEEE 1394) port or from an analog device through a video-capture card. When I first plugged my digital camcorder into a FireWire port with VideoWave running, a Windows XP pop-up menu asked what I wanted to do; I made the mistake of choosing "do nothing," which hung the program. After force-closing and restarting VideoWave, the capture feature came to life. (VideoWave itself had refused to launch after initial installation, but a system reboot cured that problem.)
