Dazzle products are they worth it?

[sumshi]

Hi, can anybody tell me if any of the products from dazzle are worth buying...I'm looking into buying it so I can trasfer to vcr tapes...also if you think there is a better product out there pls. let me know thanks

[tape_worm]

I would give the Dazzle Hollywood DV Bridge a 9 out of 10.

First, I am using a home built P4 1.8GHz Northwood on an ASUS P4T-E board with 512MB Rambus, Western Digital 120GB 7200RPM HD w/8MB buffer, Oxygen VX1 video card set to 1600x1200 using Ulead VideoStudio 6 under Windows XP. (burn with Pioneer DVR-A03)

This unit connects to the computer via FireWire (IEEE 1394), has analog inputs and outputs (RCA jacks for right, left, and video, and also S-Video connectors), and a FireWire port to connect to a DV camcorder. If you have a DV player/recorder (tabletop or camcorder), this unit is supposed to be able to be used without a computer. It is a complete standalone unit with just one mode switch to select analog-to-DV, DV-to-analog, or DV pass-through. The software that comes with it captures seperate video and audio files so I have not used it for fear of sync problems on the finished product.

Proof that you should never say something is crap until you are sure you are using it properly...When I first got this, it would drop frames randomly. Sometimes 2 minutes in, sometimes 20 minutes in, usually none (80% of the time). This was with everything closed except VideoStudio (I thought), the hard drive light was pretty much on instead of just blinking. After reading something that reminded me I am using a multi-tasking operating system, I disabled my Norton Anti-Virus auto-protect and now the hard drive light blinks but is mostly off and I have not dropped a frame since. (NOTE:DO NOT BE STUPID, ONLY DISABLE YOUR ANTI-VIRUS WHEN YOU KNOW YOU WILL NOT GET A VIRUS-such as captureing or converting video) You do need a fast hard drive though as you can not adjust the DV capture quality settings to compensate for any dropped frames. Also, when you do drop frames, it happens in a large group which totally ruins the video and needs to be recaptured. I used to have an Iomega Buz which you could set capture quality with, and if the quality was too high, the dropped frames were consistant throughout the length of the capture. This meant that instead of 29.97fps, the captured video might be a constant 28fps so it was still useable.

If you do not want to spend $230 for this though, I would highly recommend the Iomega Buz. Mine came with MGI VideoWave 1.5 which is only really good for AVI capture and output. If your hard drive is fast enough, you can get EXCELLENT quality files upto 720x480 and use another software package for converting them. The PCI card is also a SCSI adapter (non-bootable) which helps with hard drive throughput on slower machines. If your machine is too slow, the dropped frames will be consistant (as I stated above), and can be corrected by lowering the capture quality settings which include resolution, fps, KB/frame, 8 or 16 bit audio, mono or stereo, and sampling frequency. This is possibly the best capture device if you do have a slow machine though, becasue you can adjust the capture quality and all the work is done by the Buz itself, your machine only has to write the data to the hard drive. Since it only captures to AVI, you are limited in capture length to a 4GB file unless you are using WinNT (or 2000 or XP).

The only bad thing is Iomega stopped supporting it a long time ago, there are no drivers specifically for WinMe, Win2000, or WinXP. I have read about some people who did get it to work with the older drivers though. Under Win95b and Win98SE, it performed flawlessly all the time. The thing to remember is FOLLOW THE INSTALLATION INSTRUCTIONS. I would have kept using it when I built my new machine except I did not want to fight with trying to get it working under WinXP and I am no longer using any SCSI drives. I'd give the Buz a 10 easily!!! It only captures analog, but if you need to capture DV, you only need to buy a FireWire card for $20-30 and some software.

[sumshi]

WoW Tapeworm thanx a'lot for all that input about dazzle, that really helps me a'lot....also how much did that oxygen card cost ya..if you don't mind me asking :D

[tape_worm]

The Oxygen card cost me $119 at googlegear.com back in February. If that is all you are buying though, it was a few bucks cheaper at mwave.com. I got mine from googlegear because I also ordered lots of other stuff and the total $ was cheaper that way.