Roxio Game Capture Device [Video] Review (hardware/software)

Roxio Game Capture Software

The software comes in two pieces, the video capture and VideoWave and editing software. The video capture software is made to do exactly what you would expect, capture video and save it to your hard drive. It offers few settings and features but those are enough. The especially nice feature was the ability to capture a set amount of video in minutes. That allows you to focus on your gameplay and not have to worry about running your hard drive to capacity as it will automatically turn itself off. I found ten minutes to be a good length in both manageable file size and usable content. Aside from length you can also give the software a location to save to access the hotkey menu.

When you’re ready to capture you can edit a few things about the video including brightness, hue, saturation, sharpness and contrast to make sure you’ve got the best quality picture possible. My Xbox 360 was pumping out some overly bright video so I found I needed to edit the brightness.

The capture program is able to output AVI, WMV, and DivX so you can choose based on whether you’ll use the VideoWave software to edit, another package (many of which won’t read DivX) or upload right to YouTube or another online service. The software can also take a quick snapshot which is says can be saved in several formats but really it automatically saves as JPG and you need to load into other software to change the format.

Roxio Game Capture Video Editing Software

VideoWave is a fairly full-featured video editing suite complete with built in video effects, text overlay templates, transitions and audio editing. When you open the software you’re presented with a four window setup, the majority of the screen will be taken up by the preview window but you can easily grab and drag the bars to see more of the tracks in the timeline below or a larger media and effects setting area on the right. The fourth window is the content and tools menu that allows you to add pieces to your video project.

Even if you’ve never used a video editing software in the past Roxio has you covered with some quick tutorials that will give you a quick run down of the major features. Many of us have done some kind of audio or video editing in the past and are sure to pick everything up rather quickly.

The timeline track list is able to manage 32 tracks which means some fairly complex effects and overlays are able to be created along with music and sound effects. However, you’ll need to supply your own sounds as the program didn’t seem to come with any.

One major problem with the software is its tendency to crash from time to time. That’s not such a big deal in itself, the problem is that there is absolutely no autosave feature which is a massive disappointment. Every video editing suite should have autosave features because when you’re working with potentially massive video and audio files the slightest thing could trigger a program crash and you could lose work. Because of the lack of an autosave feature the video above took three hours to put together instead of one, because I lost 60% of my work twice until I remembered to save after just about every change I made. That’s both time-consuming and irritating.

The video editing software also has the ability to export videos right to some social networks when you’re finished. The Facebook integration worked fine but the YouTube upload resulted in an error for some web scripting so it was unavailable. You can also export your video the WeGame.com which is a gaming social media site.