Bore your friends the easy way... (MGI VideoWave IV)

Member Name: topofall

Product:	MGI VideoWave IV
Date:	22/02/01 (609 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Ease of use

Disadvantages: Computer hanging - probably the machine

I recently purchased a Sony TRV11E Digital Video camera, specifically with DV in/out, to use with my Firewire card. I already had ULead's Video Studio that came with the card but the interface is weird (non windows) so I searched the net for something more conventional, simple but comprehensive. After downloading several programs (large, long downloads!) I found a demo version of MGI's Video Wave IV on a magazine CD.

I tried it out and except for a few hiccups (computer hanging etc.) I found it was just what I needed so immediately ordered it from jungle.com. (See my opinion of the service that they give).

It has an easy to use interface utilising 'drag and drop' and automatic scene detection. It does detect a lot of scenes though as every time the camera button is pressed when recording produces a scene when captured into Video Wave IV. This is easy to overcome though, although it is a little labourious. Just delete the scene in the scene detector window and the previous scene absorbs it.

The program comes with a good selection of wipes - I particularly like the dropping window effect. Editing is quite easy, just using sliders to chop things about or changing the timing of titles or wipes etc.

The only snag I have found, though, is that on producing the video, which is very fast if outputting back to the camera, is that the program says that the hard disk space or compression ratio should be checked as the wirte has been unable to take place. This seems to be a Windows problem as it seems to happen when a write session of over 4 gigabytes is taking place. The solution I have found is to split the video up if it is a long one. The first video I have produced comes out at 39 minutes and I had to split it in three.

Summary: