Product Reviews

Video editing with your PC has come down in price and shot up in quality over the last couple of years. Any reasonably specified PC armed with a TV tuner graphics card and a cheap editing program can produce some quite impressive results. However, if you've already invested in a digital camcorder, you could do a lot better with a product like this. Have a look at your digital video camera: there's a pretty good chance that it'll have a digital serial connection called Firewire, iLink or IEEE-1394. Given a similar connector on your PC, capturing video from such a camcorder can be almost as easy as copying files off a floppy. You'll also be able to preserve the quality of your video, because unlike the TV tuner card approach, your movie won't have to be converted into analogue form during transfer. Firewire takes a digital film from inside your camera and plonks it straight on your hard disk without any need for data conversion.

Unfortunately, PCs with Firewire are very rare. For this reason, MGI's VideoWave DV Suite bundles just such an adapter with a copy of VideoWave 4, the company's latest editing software. Installing DV Suite's PCI Firewire adapter is easy, but you do need to be running either Windows 98SE or later.

The adapter adheres

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to the OHCI standard, drivers for which are built in to Windows. Just fit the adapter card into a spare PCI slot and point the plug-and-play routine towards your Windows CD. Install the drivers, load up the VideoWave software and you're ready to edit.

Connecting your camcorder is much easier than with analogue video capture. Instead of hooking up separate audio and video cables, a single cable is used to receive both signals. The camcorder has already digitised the audio and video, so the data can simply be copied across using the editing application.

As the hardware included in the DV Suite is pretty standard - an OHCI card will work with most DV-compatible editing software out there - the success of this package really hinges on the bundled software. Unfortunately, as we discovered in our standalone review of VideoWave 4 back in February 2001, MGI's latest release has its drawbacks. Mostly, it's let down by an interface aimed too much at the first time user. Its story-board metaphor is great for starting up, but when you want to fine tune, it's painful. You can't drag your cursor along the storyline to preview your edit, for example. On the plus side, capture now allows automatic scene detection, and Video-Wave includes a reasonable selection of effects, such as colour correction and slow motion. It also has built-in support for exporting to the MPEG-2 format used in DVDs, plus Windows Media and Real Media for streaming off the Web. You can even use MGI's streaming-media hosting service to put your videos on the Web for free.

MGI VideoWave DV Studio is good value, and it worked flawlessly in my relatively low spec test system. The main drawback is that VideoWave is really for beginners only, and once you've mastered it, you may want to upgrade to a more sophisticated package such as Sonic Foundry VideoFactory.