Roxio Videowave Movie Creator Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)This s/w came free on a new Dell computer. I've been transferring footage of a show done at my children's primary school to DVD. Goal is to produce relatively simple DVDs with about 2 hours of material, so NOT at full DVD quality. Have spent quite a few hours working on about 3 hours of material. Primarily used capture mode and the Story Line Editor; never used CineMagic or Story Line Builder.
It came installed, so I had no problems there. Applied an upgrade from the RVWMC site with no major difficulties.
The inital small spash screen remains on the screen long after the software has loaded, and clicking on its "x" does nothing. Just one of many annoyances.
The capture feature works ok and (unlike some others) RVWMC will allow capture of video in DVI format. However, it has what appears to be a poor MPEG encoder judging from results. I wanted to encode at a modest bit rate that will allow me to cram two hours onto a DVD. Experimented with different rates but it looked quite poor at low rates when compared to what Sonic could produce (see below).
Trim mode is pretty good - allowing precision of trimming down to the level of a single frame (half frame? dunno, I'm not Dr. Video). This is very useful, another advance over others.
The story line editor allows me to string clips together. Easy to get lost on a long story line; the individual pieces are not numbered and it only shows 7 at a time, with (as far as I can tell) no way to zoom out to get a feel for it.
My major gripe is that RVWMC has pieces of major features but they feel partially completed, not fully tested, not quite ready. For example, it can do a rolling credit with a variable font -- pretty nice if you're content with a few lines. But the textbox that accepts the text simply stops accepting characters after about 30 lines. Then what? For example, right-clicking on a piece of the story line shows a properties window, and various text boxes allow you to put the cursor in them -- but you cannot change anything. For example, you can put a solid frame in the story line and put plain text on top of it, but you cannot edit the text - the Done button cannot be clicked.
The lack of support is simply exasperating. Roxio points the finger at Dell in my case, but (as you can imagine) Dell's call center in India has nothing to offer. ...
Even on my relatively capable machine it feels slow. Switching among tasks takes seconds sometimes, which is longer than it should. What is it doing?
By comparison, for simple tasks, Sonic's MyDVD has fewer options but a better MPEG encoder, and in general works far more smoothly with fewer glitches and crashes. Sonic's "good" mode (basically VCD bit rate, I think) still looks acceptable. I finally gave up on RVWMC for this project and used Sonic.
Don't spend much money on this one, that's my advice.
Full details: my Roxio VideoWave Movie Creator has version stamp 1,6,676,1 according to Help/About. Running on a WinXP box, 2.4Ghz, 512Mb, lots of disc.

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