VideoWave Movie Creator Review Hands-Off Cinematography John P. Mello Jr.
Captured video clips, as well as imported images and audio files, appear as thumbnail items in onscreen palettes called libraries. As you import video, Movie Creator will break it up into clips whose start and end is determined by when you started and stopped the camera during shooting.
Although incoming video is chunked into clips, all video imported during a capture session appears as a single thumbnail in the main library. If a thumbnail has a "shortcut" arrow on it, that means there are a series of clips linked to it. When you click on the thumbnail, the linked clips will appear in another palette below the main one.
While this layout conserves palette space, it's a bit disconcerting for users who belong to the "learn to swim by diving in over your head" school of education. The scheme is even more awkward in CineMagic, which totally ignores the clips created by VideoWave -- only thumbnails from a main palette can be dragged and dropped to the CineMagic window. That's an aggravating, needless restriction on users' creativity.
When using CineMagic, the run time for the video you bring into the program should be twice the length of your music clip. All native sound is thrown out and replaced with your music track.
The resulting music video will depend on your style choice. Opting for a "personal" style will emphasize face shots, for example, while "nostalgia" will create a sepia-toned video. Overall, CineMagic's smooth output was a pleasant surprise, yielding high-qualify if prefab-looking music videos. You can customize these in VideoWave's Storyline editor, but any trimming or pasting you do will likely knock the video out of sync with the underlying music.
More Than Music Videos
VideoWave's other "super wizard" is StoryBuilder, which also holds users' hands from the beginning to the end of a video creation. You name your production and choose a template -- birthday, anniversary, or whatever.
Next, you select an introduction, which includes an animated graphic, and create a title. Then you add your clips in the order you want them to appear, choose some music, add an ending, slap on an end title, and you're done.
After a few of these automated video productions, you may want to test your wings creating a movie from scratch. For that, you can use VideoWave's StoryLine editor -- the tool that lets you actually perform typical editing tasks such as trimming video or audio clips, inserting transitions between shots, and adding titles, special effects, and overlays.
Movie Creator comes with lots of content you can use in StoryLine. The package provides more than 80 transitions (wipes, reveals, page turns, and more); 40 text styles and motions; 100 special effects; and 92 audio tracks. (A sister program, Roxio's $100 VideoWave 5 Power Edition, adds even more transitions and effects, but omits CineMagic and StoryBuilder.)
You cobble together your video in StoryLine by dragging your media elements to its storyboard. The latter shows thumbnails of your media elements, giving a visual representation of what your video will look like.
Unlike most video editors, StoryLine doesn't have a timeline that shows the layers of media in your video (for instance, a video clip in one layer, its soundtrack in another, and a title in a third layer).
Timelines make it easy to synchronize your media elements by sliding them along the line, or to trim clips because you can see every frame in the clip. But in StoryLine, synchronization must be done from menus or by grouping elements, a clunky process at best.
Once you've completed your video, Movie Creator does make it easy to save it in finished form. Rather than resorting to technical mumbo-jumbo, VideoWave offers a friendly menu of output options based on where you intend to show the video -- back on your digital camcorder, a VCR, DVD player, PC video file, or streamed over the Internet -- and adjusts the quality and format of your video accordingly. As with all video applications, just be sure you have plenty of hard disk space; a "best" quality, just-over-two-minute music video created with CineMagic ate up 130MB.
VideoWave Movie Creator is a buffed or pumped-up "paint by numbers" video editor. It'll meet the needs of inexperienced and impatient users, while offering a bit more headroom than novices-only packages like Windows Movie Maker or Sony's MovieShaker, but is likely to frustrate videographers with an unfettered creative bent or experience with fine-tuned, timeline-based editing.
