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VideoWave III
by By Chris Cooper—Tucson Computer Society www.aztcs.org November 2000 , ccooper@tucsonelectric.com - December 02, 2000 at 13:26:43:
VideoWave III, a video editing program for the personal computer, is a comprehensive package that includes real-time edit and playback functions with the ability to save your work in a number of formats. The finished product can then be viewed on your PC’s monitor, a television set, or sent to a VCR for videotape recording. Depending on the capabilities of your PC’s video capture card, your source of video files with which to work can be a large, full-size VHS camcorder, a VCR, or the newest DV (digital video) camera.With the update to VideoWave version 3.5, you may now use .jpg and .tif still image files in your videos. The upgrade, which is free from the website, http://www.mgisoft.com also includes the new ability to use the very popular mp3 audio file format for your video’s audio tracks as well as the traditional .wav format.
The manual that comes with the software is very helpful for beginners at video editing. It explains every detail of the process from a novice’s perspective. It explains each step of the capture, edit, production, and display process. It is very easy to follow along using the book.
It takes a while to learn each of the icons that are presented to you on the main screen when first starting out. Each icon relates to a specific action that can be taken with a video clip. A clip is defined as a piece of video footage that hasn’t been edited yet. Upon editing, the combined clips are known as a scene. To create a scene, one must gather various clips from any source that your capture card will support, then assemble the frames of the movie together with sound into a product that can be viewed on either computer screen or TV screen, or copied out to a videotape if you have video-out capabilities. Another possibility is to send it out to a website for Internet use.
The best playback and editing is achieved when using a fairly fast computer. The book mentions 500Mhz or faster for smoothest response. Also, the faster your hard drive and system bus, the better the results will be. For instance, my 450Mhz Pentium II computer will play the videos but it’s a bit choppy. I am using an ATA/33 hard drive on a 100Mhz system bus with PC100 RAM. I would have to upgrade my system to an ATA/66 or higher hard drive to get much better results.
They also recommend a faster RPM drive since it can keep up with the demand for frame rates better. I am using a 5400-rpm drive, but 7200 rpm or faster would clean up the playback noticeably. For me to upgrade, I would have to purchase a newer, faster hard drive which would require me to purchase an ATA/66 controller card to make it all work. This would improve my overall system performance as well. Everything would run faster and better.
The next bottleneck is my RAM. Faster PC133, VC133, or RAMBUS RAM would be needed, but my motherboard doesn’t support it. So, I would have to get a newer, faster motherboard. At this point, I would be getting close to being able to purchase a new computer for the same cost as the upgrade.
All performance issues aside, the program performs as advertised. It takes a little while to associate all the icons with their functions but once learned, it is relatively easy to edit from any source. I had a moment of shock when I realized how much space one needs to allocate to video to produce anything over a minute in length; 4MB per second of recorded video. This is at 30 frames per second mode at a resolution of 320 x 240 pixels, in MPEG-2 capture, which compresses the saved file to a size that is somewhat manageable. Assuming you have a 5-minute video you want to make, you would need a total of 1.2GB free space (4MB/sec x 60 seconds per minute x 5 minutes).
This is perhaps the single most intensive thing your CPU will ever do, as the video is laid down at 320 pixels x 240 pixels x 30 frames per second, or 2.3 million pixels per second. The better your video card, the less work your CPU has to do. Most of the faster video cards being offered today can achieve rates much higher than this, but older cards would struggle to keep up. My Voodoo3 card supposedly does eight megapixels per second, but my CPU can’t keep up with that rate. The result is that the playback is not as smooth as it might be.
VideoWave III supports digital video (DV) input and output. Usually, this is accomplished via the use of a Firewire or IEEE1394 or iLink card in your computer, which lets your DV camera plug directly into the very fast 400MB/sec transfer bus and get your work done in a hurry. When producing a video, usually each frame must be rendered separately. When using a DV camcorder, VW III lets you produce your video much more quickly if it hasn’t had any transitions or edits done to it by using the footage as-is, with no rendering needed. This can save much time and resources.
Sound input to a video is in .wav format. The newest version supports using .mp3 file types as your input, which is then converted to .wav format. This takes a lot of CPU time to do the conversion but it does it very nicely. Don’t mind the grinding noise as the .mp3 is expanded to ten times its normal size, as it becomes a .wav file.
Up to six audio tracks can be incorporated into a video production. The quality of an audio track is determined by its sample rate. Higher sample rates use more storage space, but sound excellent. A sample rate is how many times per second the input is measured for differences. The highest quality available here is 44,100 Hz/sec, used for stereo music from a digital source. The lowest quality is 11,000 Hz/sec, used for speech and is usually a single track. An intermediate range is 22Khz, either mono or stereo.
The higher quality the source material, the higher quality your output can be, with space being a limiting parameter. The audio sample size in bits determines the audio’s dynamic range and signal-to-noise ratio. For music, 16-bit is preferred; for speech, 8-bit is fine. VWIII supports fade in, fade out, repeat, and mix functions for audio. There is a volume slider to adjust the level, and a left-right signal meter shows relative volume levels per channel in your work of art.
With a bit of patience and a lot of reading, you can quickly master this program to produce your own movie. The book is well done and easy to read. The binding on my book broke but it took quite a beating. Overall, the ease-of-use is quite good and a novice can get up and running in about two or three days. Most of the time is spent figuring out the icons and the time sliders.
A person with some experience could easily produce their own movie in a few hours. It is similar to the Ulead Video Studio program, which does the many of the same things. Digital Video using a Pinnacle card would probably work the best with VideoWaveIII.
I recommend this product highly. Watch for great deals on it at CompUSA or when it is bundled with a DV camcorder or capture card.
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