Software : Dazzle Video Creator Platinum [OLD VERSION]

Rating: - dazzle video creator platinum
this may be a good product but it did not work for what we wanted to do. I don't feel it was the product, just our application

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Rating: - Video Creator Platinum
Works as advertised I have had no real problems and due to the internal processor I can use it with a laptop.

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Rating: - Drops frames, no audio control, skip Pinnacle
Despite it being advertised as having hardware compression, it dropped frames during capture. Even though the capture app would say zero frames were dropped, the captured video was very choppy with audio dropouts. Analyzing the file with VirtualDub (an excellent free program) verified there were indeed dropped frames. My software-only Turtle Beach Video Advantage drops fewer frames. Given this is the point of the device, it gets one star for failing to achieve this basic task. (My system is well above the stated minimums.)

The software supplied with the unit (which you must use, as the device works with no other standard capture programs) has no ability that I was able to find for adjusting the incoming audio level, which was quite low.

The software also lacks a simple/quick capture program that will just capture video to a file on disk (I use other editing software and just wanted a quick direct-to-MPEG2 option). You have to load the full Studio program, and the capture section had no option for turning off the preview during capture, I suspect one of the reasons it drops frames. The preview window is tiny and not resizable, which makes seeing your capture adjustments pretty much impossible.

Given the poor performance, bloated and inflexible software, and a previous bad experience with the Pinnacle DC10a, I will never purchase a Pinnacle product again.

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Rating: - Good Product
It works great for me. I have used it to make still pictures from videos and transfer 8mm to DVD.

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Rating: - Partly Works (3 Stars? Amazon won't let me change stars)
The product looks good but I'll never know because as soon as the InstantDVD program started, it crashed. Every time I tried it, same result. Studio looks like a nice program, easier to use than Windows Movie Maker, but about the same features, so not enough reason to keep it when direct-to-DVD is what I really needed. I have a Media Edition Dell 9100 with 1G RAM, Pentium D, and plenty of disk space, so hardware is not lacking.

Update: I had it packaged for return but decided to try one other PC. I was able to capture video, but I lost a few DVDs due to the bugs in the product. Example: you choose 1 of 3 levels of quality, it tells you how many minutes you can fit on your DVD. If I did not tell it to stop at or before that time elapsed, it would burn the DVD but never finish it for use. The software would hang and require a reboot; the DVD would not play. Also, you might think that if you have 30 minutes of time, you could burn 15 minutes of tape, then fast forward to another section of tape and burn 15 more minutes. Wrong. As soon as you try to burn the second segment, it hangs and, again, never finishes the DVD.

Living within these restrictions, I was able to convert many tapes to DVD, but I had to set an alarm so as not to miss the magic end time. I also wasted disks trying to use the option to create menus. In short, I could only transfer exactly what was on the VHS to the DVD with no editing.