The production of video in the home has grown vastly in popularity as more and more people turn to personal computer ownership as a source of work, information and leisure. The race is on as companies compete to become the first to produce commercially available low-price software capable of producing broadcast quality output. MGI Software have high hopes with their VideoWave package, boasting that it will make "PC video easy."

VideoWave has been designed to make use of the Intel MMX processor, but MGI hopes that the real crowd pleasers will be the special effects, the video capture utility, and the variety of output options all crammed into a supposedly easy to use, intuitive interface.

VideoWave is a PC only application, in fact, VideoWave is a Windows 95 only application. Attempts to set up the program on our NT based machine failed miserably. This is a major drawback in the professional use of the program as many companies and freelancers, based in the digital effects industry, use NT workstation set ups.

The VideoWave interface - almost as confusing as it looks! Click for a larger version.

Unique and interesting interfaces seem to be a trend that many products are taking these days, VideoWave among them. The theory being that by simplifying the interface a child can use it. Although the VideoWave interface is in no way as intuitive as those of Metacreations, the industry leader in IU design, products; it does have some wonderfully easy to use features, drag and drop video clips, simple VCR like controls, and an interesting storyline bar at the top of the screen.

The sequence of shots in your video is on display at the top of the screen throughout your editing session, editing becomes a simple matter of scrolling to the required shot and cutting it as required. New shots are imported into the Video Library which takes refuge at right of the screen.

A wide variety of file formats are supported, the most common being AVI and QuickTime MOV, MPEG, and standard image formats such as BMP, JPG, TIFF, TARGA, EPS, GIF, and even some formats alien to animators such as Paintbrush PCX, and Kodak PhotoCD: PCD.

VideoWave also allows you to add audio to your movies, a library for audio files sits right next to the video library. For those who perhaps don't have access to the necessary resources to create many video and audio files, an extra CD contains many animations, shots, movies, pictures and even audio clips that you can load into the libraries for both practice in editing techniques and for use in your own movies.

The special effects. A "Relief" effect applied to a fan...look's familiar...hmm, I wonder! Click for a larger version.

VideoWave has a very easy way in which you can edit and transact to shots. You simply drag your shot onto the screen, edit it, add your special effects, text, and even capture from it, then just drag it onto the storyline at the top of the screen and it is a part of the movie. Do the same to the next shot, and then you can change the way in which the two shots cut. Make them fade, wipe, dissolve, and do a number of other strange things using effects in the transition library. These effects are quite basic, but work very well.

Adding special effects to movies is very easy too, simply select the shot you require, select the effect from the library (many of which just happen to resemble PhotoShop filters), and set the start and finish time. Unfortunately, these effects seem somewhat pointless and only about two of them may ever become useful to anyone. Effects like "Spherize", "Relief", and "Swirl" are useful only for showing off the fact that you can add a nice effect to a video clip. The effects are poorly implemented and can be done much more effectively in PhotoShop!

A demonstration of "Chroma Keying", the white in the window has been set to transparent...or it is supposed to be. Click for a larger version.

For those who want to add text to their movies VideoWave has the ability to make text scroll and fade, text can appear in any colour, font or size, and you can easily set how long it stays on the screen for. Unfortunately, that's all it can do. No flashing text here, no flying, spinning or swirling titles, just plain simple scrolling and fading - and the closest thing you'll get to a composite in VideoWave is their "Chroma Keying" tool; allowing you to make one color in your image transparent. However, the results of this tool are extremely dissapointing as you can see from the image to the right.

By now you are probably getting confused as to what is going on with your movie. With the time line present in almost every video editing package to date replaced with a "storyline" in VideoWave, confusion was bound to set in sooner or later.

When your movie is finally complete, the file format output options are very pleasing, but you are greatly limited in the output size to either 160 x 120 pixel movie, a 320 x 240 pixel movie, or a 640 x 480 pixel movie.

VideoWave has some good features: ease of use, multiple formats for import and export, the ability to produce streaming video for the Internet. The documentation is good too, but the files needed for the tutorial are missing from the package. VideoWave is downgraded by these missing tutorial files, the poorly implemented filters, the limited output file sizes and most significantly it's nonfunctionality on NT workstations.

VideoWave is a good starting point at a reasonable price for the entry level hobbyist but inadequate for professional and even prosumer use.


Paul Younghusband is a digital artist and Chief Editor of Visual Magic Magazine. He lives in North-East England and can be contacted by email at paul@visualmagic.awn.com.

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