I thought this program was great for about an hour. I left it alone overnight to burn because it was taking FOREVER to burn a DVD, and my otherwise perfect computer died inexplicably in the middle of the night. After 200 dollars to replace my motherboard and a huge fried hard drive, I have reinstalled not thinking it had anything to do with this program. Now my computer is "fixed" and it has crashed after this program froze for the 50th time. DO NOT USE THIS PROGRAM!!!! I don't know if this is what fried my hard drive or not, but I can sympathize with the others who say it has made their computer unresponsive, I am trying to uninstall as we speak, however, my computer will not even boot up at this point! In addition, it is very easy to use, but if you have any skills in video editing, don't waste your time, the audio options are very primitive, you cannot even edit audio in the menu. Don't waste your time or money! Buyer beware!!!

I don't get all this moaning and complaining about this product. I installed it with no problems and found it extremely easy to use. I have Windows XP on a Athlon 2Ghz. One would have to be completely computer-illiterate not to pick up this software and be able to use it with ease. It even comes with a DVD burning tool,DVD playing software, DVD label creator and a video capture tool. It has nice touches, like a lot of effects and transitions and it's even possible to do some color correction of brightness/contrast/RGB. It also has two modes: Timeline and Storyboard, and it's very easy to add/edit video and audio and setup chapter on the DVD builder tool. Don't get me wrong, it's not a professional tool (and for that alone I took 1 star off because the name of the product is misleading), but obviously aimed at the home video market, like birthdays and holiday videos. I feel it's the most complete product within this price range and I'm really happy with it.

Call me old fashioned but when I purchase a product, I expect it to work. And when it doesn't, I want the support from the company. If you have the option, buy another product and save yourself 50 bucks.
My problems began with what seemed to be a small item.
After registering my product, i was unable to access the technical support. The "ask Rox" was useless and so were the chat rooms. after paying 35 more dollars to talk to a real person, i still dont have the answers i'm looking for.
Oh, and, by the way. The technical support person "lori" was snippy, curt and downright condescending.

Working with videos is supposed to be fun. After 2 months of negative reinforcements, this whole story has been a fiasco.

The software crashes my PC. I have downloaded newest video card driver and installed Roxio's update patch. Still has the same problem. I tried to get tech support on their web site. They said my support ID# came with package is invalid. E-mailed their customer service, it has been two week did not receive any response.

Video Wave Problems:


1. Installation: Here is what I sent to ROXIO about my installation problems.
When installed my system won't reboot. I had to run in safe mode and use the last known configuration to get it to boot. I get the update hoping that will solve the problem. No. First during the install I get a message saying something like "Can't start the InstallShield script". It goes on any way. Again I have to start in safe mode. Because of this I have lost configuration for other programs and at this point I have no idea what effect it will have on them. Video Wave blows up in the middle of saving a movie which wastes time and work. Is there a fix for these problems? Thanks, Richard Hume

2. I received more than one response. One told me to get all of the updates for Easy Media Creator 7. The next one told me to disable everything that starts with Windows! Never was Video Creator 7 mentioned! Everything referred to Easy Media Creator 7.

3. I called technical support and they gave me the normal excuse that the problem is caused by the virus scanner. Disable that and if it still does not work call back. As always it made no difference. I called back and after 35
minutes of bad music I hung up. To be honest I really doubt that they have any idea how to solve the problems. I keep looking for an update but there isn't one. Maybe one will come along sometime but I certainly wouldn't count on it. This is software that never should have been released!

4. Video Wave has no idea that I have a CD or DVD drive on my computer. I use Nero to create the DVD. If Video Waves DVD writer software is no better than Video Wave it is worthless. Most likely it is Easy CD of an offshoot from it. If so it is a piece of junk. If you are using Easy CD throw it away and
get Nero. Your problems will disappear.

Here are just a few of the problems found while using this piece of junk.

1. The monitor sizes are so small it is VERY difficult to edit a video. There is no way that I can find to enlarge them. It is also absolutely unbelievable that the monitor size for changing brightness, contrast, colors... is much larger than in any other mode. RIDICULOUS!

2. When editing clips and selecting start and end points the slider is so small that it is completely useless.

3. Those wheels in editing modes are cute but have no real value. A better slider is what is needed.

4. There is no way to stop rewind unless you double click the play button. That does not serve any purpose while editing the move. Because the slider is useless in editing modes rewind would be the best alternative but you can't stop the movie where you want to. Additionally the cursor becomes so slow and
jerky it is very difficult to get the cursor on the play button. Because a quick double click (play, pause) is required to stop the video the second click is often ignored which makes the feature useless.

5. When looking for a scene in storyline or timeline modes it is not possible to know which scene you are at. Every scene is marked with the production name. I already know that, I want to know which scene it is.

6. Occasionally VideoWave will not create clips in formats other than WMV. The only solution I can find is to first save the entire movie in WMV format so it is editable. A huge waste of time and lost quality.

7. Because it is necessary to save the production after every edit so it is not necessary to re-edit the movie after the program blows up it would be nice if ctrl-s would work like it does in every other windows program that I know about.

8. It is impossible to split a clip at more than one place. Why, especially because in some cases VideoWave is unable to create scenes correctly in the first place.

9. Scene detection? This one is just weird. It makes little difference where the sensitivity is set. I have a 15 minute movie that will only produce 10 scenes at 50 and 21 scenes at 100. At 100 some of the scenes are actually longer! To get to 21 scenes it created several very short scenes that are virtually identical, which is useless!

10. If start and end points are set in a scene and you want to re-edit them there is no way to do it. If I use reset start or end point it moves to the start or end of the movie, not the clip!!!! Now you have the whole movie inserted in the middle of your movie. As far as I can tell you have 2 choices. 1 - Try to find the spot in the whole movie where you want the start or end point, not possible with a short clip. 2 - Delete the clip, which is now the whole movie and re-insert the clip that was deleted. Because there is no way to know which clip was deleted it is very difficult to find the clip you want to re-insert.

11. Detecting scenes in the manual mode: This is the best joke of all. The only options available are the slider (thanks at least for omitting the wheel!), play, move one frame, move to start or end of the movie, not the scene! If any of these functions are used (except start and end) you have no
idea which scene you are in, or even where you are in the entire movie! USELESS! The slider only works for the entire movie and not the scene you are working on. If you are working on a long movie a very small move of the slider will jump several scenes.

12. Keyboard: The keyboard does not do much in VideoWave. It is far easier to edit with the keyboard than the mouse, especially when the sliders can't be used because the useful space on the slider is to small to be usable.

13. The more I use it the slower it gets. It often goes off somewhere for minutes with no indication that it is doing anything at all! There is no way to know if it is actually doing something or if it has just crashed. The best thing to do is to go have lunch and then check if is working. You can also start the task manager and select the performance tab. If 100% of the CPU is in use then Video Wave is probably still hacking away at something. If not and it won't respond to anything tell Task Manager to end the task. You have just
lost all of your work again.

14. I am quite sure there are many more problems but I am going to stop wasting my time on it.

15. There is no doubt that this thing is the poorest software design I have seen in 30 years of home computers. Even if the thing worked the design is so bad it would be useless anyway.

16. Professional? Not a chance. Maybe the proper word is theft because that is exactly what ROXIO is doing when they take your money.