Software : Dazzle Video Creator Platinum [OLD VERSION]

Rating: - Creator Platinum works great!
Dazzle Creator Platinum is a first-class product, but it is important to know that it only works properly with a computer restart AFTER ALL SOFTWARE AND HARDWARE INSTALLATION. The software clearly requires a re-start, but there is no mention of it for the hardware. After installing the hardware (following installation of the software as instructed in the "getting started" pamphlet) I encountered the problems mentioned in many of the reviews, but after a final computer re-start the system worked perfectly. I recommend a computer re-start each time the hardware is connected.

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Rating: - Pinnacle Products
People who only want to capture raw footage from a source to a DVD are probably happy with this product. If you have anything with quick cuts or low light or anything already edited that you want to capture you will find that the software pinnacle supplies for ALL of its products is very weak. It takes hours to render, will drop MANY frames and the support is laughable. People who have preconfigured machines like Dell or Gateway or the likes will either like it very much because they're novice's or they'll have problems with the software conflicting with their AOL or other preloaded "let me help you baby" software. I would get a better capture device and then buy a seperate software suite. Try demo's online before you buy...

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Rating: - I even upgraded to Studio Plus!
I had plenty of 8mm (and Hi8) tapes from the past 15 years and I'm afraid that they'll go bad.

Got this product hoping that I could transfer them to DVD and eternally keep them (and even make copies for grandparents and family).

After purchasing it, I put my oldest tape in my camcorder (8mm) and hooked it up. It provides two ways to transfer. One is a direct tape-to-DVD store where when you play from your camcorder, it automatically writes to your DVD. I chose this and when it was done - boy, I was pleased. It made a DVD, plopped it in my DVD and it worked great.

I so pleased, I wanted to be creative, so I chose the other option and that was to use their Studio software. Here, you play your camcorder tape and it "captures" it on your hard-drive. Then you edit it and write it to a DVD.

The first time around, it did a very good job of detecting "scene breaks", so that you can create your own DVD "chapters" and you can combine the chapters easily when needed.

Then it comes with a lot of transitions from chapter to chapter and title screens and menus. Boy, my creative side went nuts. I create a real nice title screen (I know my way around the PC, so it was very easy for me to edit) and create a menu screen to let the DVD user choose between "Play movie", "Select Chapter" - just like you would see on a movie DVD. The menus they provide are nice too - I selected a wedding theme which had a nice background and rotating champagne glass.

Okay - the catch, with regular Studio, they only allow one menu choice - but you can upgrade to Studio Plus from the application for $30.

I burned a DVD with one menu choice and it came very nicely. It has smart compression capabilities to make sure it fits on one DVD if you want. I rather not compress and it seems to fit about 90 minutes of video on a DVD without compress. Granted, it did 90% quality compression and it still looked okay for me for home-movie purposes.

I was so pleased with the menu capabilities, I purchased the upgrade. And it's online through the application, so it was fast to do.

It has both S-video and Component (or was it Composite ... the Yellow plug!) hook-ups, so you can choose. I'm gonna try to be creative to hook it up to my TiVo and record some things (like my Gators NCAA championship game) from there - I think it will work (haven't tried) - but it will record any kind of input.

Two notes - if your PC doesn't have a lot of memory, it will be slow to load (about 1 minute) and when it is "creating" the movie it will be slowish too. I have 512 MB - which honestly is on the low end for today's machine, so I think I am going to upgrade to 1 GB and I think this will help.

Also, if you capture movies on your hard drive *it will take up a lot of space*! A good two hour movie capture will take about 1-2 (or more) GB of hard drive space. You either have to be diligant of deleting them or make sure you have enough room. So, check your drive space.

I'm very pleased with this and am looking forward to converting years of home movies onto DVDs.

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Rating: - Great product - based on the feature set.
I used the older version of this - the Dazzle DVC130, which only has hardware encoding for MPEG1 & MPEG2. Great product and as this product comes with MPEG4 & DivX hardware encoding I would recommend this to anyone interested in home video capture. Only one question in my mind - does this encode both for both PAL and NTSC video standards? If so this would be one of the best video capture options around for this price range.

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Rating: - Perfect Tool
This little device was the perfect tool for me. I wanted something to help me convert stuff I Tivo'ed to my computer. This way I could watch stuff on my laptop. My laptop also does not have a built in dvd player (its an ultraportable and requires an external dvd player), so having all this video on my hard drive really helps alot!!!

The set up was very easy. I just did the software installation off the cd, and plugged it in to my laptop and the s-video and audit outputs of my tivo....and voila. It took a few minutes to configure the software, but once set, this device was cake. So far so good!