VideoWave is one of the big three home video editing suites, and in terms of units sold claims to be the biggest. Roxio's latest version, VideoWave 7 Professional, includes three ways of creating videos: using the editor, Storybuilder or Cinemagic.

The first of these calls on the main editing suite of the program and offers the most control over your video's composition. Storybuilder, on the other hand, automates much of the editing process, once you've defined the video clips you want to include and the overall style of the piece. The third way is through Cinemagic, which in its simplest guise is a music-video creator. This program takes your selected video clips and a soundtrack, picks the most interesting bits from the clips and edits them down to fit the length of the audio.

To do this, you have to specify at least twice as much video as audio and be prepared for the program to rearrange your clips in the order it thinks best fits the music. If it deems it necessary, it may also leave certain clips out altogether. This may sound a bit Draconian, but from our tests, it produces visually interesting videos with the minimum of work.

There are 11 different styles you can use with Cinemagic, with titles like Martian Disco, Memories B & W and Fun & Fast and your style choice makes a considerable difference to the video you get at the end. Contrast this with Storybuilder, a more traditional automation system which takes your video clips, adds its own transitions and produces something more like a home video, again with little intervention. In this case, there are 33 different styles within six categories to choose from.

Finally, if you want to use VideoWave 7 Pro as a more traditional video editor, the clean, Aqua-like interface looks more professional than some of its rivals, but contains most of the same facilities. You have a conventional storyline view and, for the first time, a timeline view of your video. You can preview clips imported from files and cameras and you can add transitions, text, overlays and special effects to enhance your movies.

When it comes to burning DVDs, you can add standard menus and effects, but you can also add titles to DVDs you've already recorded, such as discs of your favourite TV shows, recorded on a set-top DVD recorder. This is a handy extra.

A 1.6GHz Pentium 4 with 256MB of memory and 1GB of hard disk space is recommended by Roxio, with an extra gigabyte for every five minutes of video you want to create. While not a high specification by today's standards, in use the software appears more dependent on its hardware platform than it main rivals do.

VideoWave 7 Pro has been extended in useful ways, while maintaining a particularly clean and easy to understand interface. The Cinemagic automation is a bit gimmicky, but you're not forced to use it - Storybuilder and the main video editor offer all you need.