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Product: VideoWave III
Company: MGI Software
Website: http://www.mgisoft.com
Estimated Street Price: $99.95
Review By: Julien Jay

Editing

Table Of Contents
1: Introduction
2: GUI & Compatibility 
3: Features In-Depth
4: Conclusion

To start editing your favorite videos the library is your starting point. From here you’ll be able to locate and add the images/videos/sounds you want to edit by simply use a drag and drop! Sure you can directly capture videos from VideoWave 3.5. This is one of the improved features of this new release: you can use predefined configurations and switch between different configurations by a single mouse click. By example predefined capture template are available for ATI All In Wonder 128 boards or Matrox Marvel ones. This brand new release hopefully manages with success the DV standard and IEEE1394 (FireWire) protocol. These two standards are essential to acquire videos from digital camcorders. But in return the videos you’ll capture will fit in enormous files’ size. The program now manages the MPEG 1 & MPEG 2 codes that allow users to capture MPEG 2 videos in real time whatever the hardware and the source you used. The cutting room allows you to fine-tune the beginning and ending pictures of video sequences by easily adding starting points and end points. From it you can also add pictures or sound. This sequence will be build together in a dynamic scenario where you’ll be able to choose a wide range of scene transitions effects (more than 60 Creative minds will be satisfied). When you edit DV videos you’ll get an instant preview of the final sequence, thanks to the unique and brand new SmartDV technology only offers by VideoWave III.

You can also add special effects to your videos such as ripple, swirl that’ll make your video looks like a pro. But you can also change the color appearance of your video clips by using the different filters that VideoWave carries: it gives great results to soften a video when there’s a too much dominant color. You can also add great titles to your movies by using the text animator: you can choose the colors of your text, the outline and shadow styles and even the font. From it you can animate your text to make it bounce, scroll on the final video.

You can even save your favorite text effects (thanks to the 3.5 update) by simply clicking a button. The audio studio will allow you to fine-tune the soundtrack of your film: you’ll be able to edit sounds from 8bits mono / 11kHz and 16bits stereo 44kHz.  Finally you can define the color settings, brightness, and luminosity directly from the darkroom.

Video Format

As written before, VideoWave III offers two different qualities video mode: MPEG II or DV one. During our tests we capture the same video in DV format or MPEG II format and we found no big quality difference between the two different files. But the MPEG II file is 4 times smaller than the DV one. So we really think that the MPEG II support is a real ‘plus’ of this software that’ll make you save your precious hard disk storage space. Sure once your video is build you can use the output mode of VideoWave to record your favorite video to any external video sources such as VCR.

Help

Surprisingly MGI VideoWave III doesn’t have an HTML based help file, too bad! However the standard help file is complete and its contents can be rated as good. Concerning the user’s guide it’s simply a marvel since it’s very complete and illustrated. It’ll help most users to start using VideoWave and their camcorders. It also includes a video glossary!

 
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