DAZZLE DVD CREATION STATION 200

[mol3000]

i bought the dazzle station 200 from best buy..... i wanted to no if anyone had any trlb with this and how do it works for u?????

[mol3000]

hheeelllooooo where we at wit this one??????

[tharris]

I tried the Dazzle Creation Station 200 as I had been using the original Dazzle Video Creator and ended up returning the Creation Station after trying it for a couple of days. The software released with the Creation Station is BETA and very buggy/unstable; you can get an update CD upon request from Dazzle.

The captured "MPEGs" are proprietary so you have to "produce" ie - convert them from MovieStar before you can play them outside of Dazzle or on a VCD/SVCD/DVD unless you don't mind not having sound. Could call this clever marketing as one of the supposed advantages of the Creation Station is that capturing through the device avoids lengthy render time due to the onboard conversion chip.

Overall, the Creation Station was a piece of junk in my book. If I learned anything from the Dazzle experience it was that there are no short cuts to video editing and the only way to get good results is to capture to AVI, edit, and then encode to MPEG or MPEG2 depending on your requirements.

I went with Canopus equipment and it is like night and day in terms of results, stability, and ease of use. So, unless you LIKE solving technical problems, banging your head against a wall, have infinite time to exchange email with Dazzle tech. support, I would run, not walk, back to Best Buy and get your $s back.

By the way, check eBay as I will be getting rid of my Dazzle DVC....

[mol3000]

u said it aint capture audio?????? do u think there is any fixes for it yet????? and if not then i wll carry it right back.... da only sad part is bb will put the money back on the gift card i got it off of .................AND IS ANYONE ELSE OUT THERE GOT ONE?????

[Mxjshaf69]

I have one. I all depends on what your doing with it. I captured to dvd my first time. Then i encoded it in TMPGenc and had audio sync problems with it. But i just encoded it in parts and then merged them. Then i burned with ulead DVD WS and i have a great quality movie. Although i tried capturing DVD and then converting it to svcd with a bitrate of 2900 and it wasn't very good. It has these wierd horizontal lines and is really jumpy. I think it's really the best usb capturer, but i would go with a pci one.

[mol3000]

thanks for yo info also.... the thing is that this is for the laptop so it will have to be usb one..... i was thinkin about buying that firewire card for the laptop and trying one of the firewire connections but i didnt wanna pay 80 for a little shitty card if i can do the same thing with usb...... also for $300 product i though dazzle could do better than that.........

[John Pilkinton]

I just bought one of these devices 2 days ago, and I haven't had any problems capturing video. The only problem I am having is recording a 60 minute video in VCD(MPeg1 format) and the file size being 1.2gigs
The first capture I did after getting it was in DVD format. I got those same horizontal lines also, but I went to full screen and they were almost gone.
So I am thinking when showing on a large tv screen, they might be gone.
The quality was awesome. Audio + Video in sync. I don't see why so many people are having problems with this. I am using it on my 1.06Ghz laptop.
Does anyone know how I can shrink the filesize of my mpegs down?

[tharris]

The captured MPEGs are in proprietary format when captured by MovieStar and NO AUDIO will be heard with the captured file if you attempt to play it outside of MovieStar until you "produce" the file
from MovieStar.

Producing is basically the same as rendering and for every minute of video captured, it took 6 minutes to do the producing. I fail to see how this saves time as rendering 1 minute of DV AVI to VCD MPEG takes 2 minutes on the same system.

You also state that you don't want to spend $80 for a "little shitty" firewire card if you can do the same thing with USB. Have you read the specs for firewire vs. USB? If you had you would know why USB capture devices have to compress the video stream (ie - some form of MPEG) because USB lacks the necessary bandwidth to transfer video at DV speeds.

The same people that say they don't have any problems capturing video go on to mention all of the glitches that pop up here and there. The bundled MovieStar software is buggy - crashes often, freezes the system, and creates non-standard MPEGs that have to be re-rendered to be useful.

Here's another bug - try sending the file you just captured with the Creation Station to your TV/VCR. My TV displayed no signal/wavy and distorted lines. The same video would output fine after it was produced so the Creation Station can't even play back its native video files out to the TV/VCR.

You get what you pay for but at $300 this isn't cheap for all of the problems that get bundled with this unit.

Check out the reviews of this card in the Capture Cards section if you aren't convinced to ditch this device.

[mol3000]

i will check it out..... dont sound good so far..... i hope i can find da receipt

[John Pilkinton]

tharris,
I have to disagree & agree on this statement:
The captured MPEGs are in proprietary format when captured by MovieStar and NO AUDIO will be heard with the captured file if you attempt to play it outside of MovieStar until you "produce" the file
from MovieStar.

Believe it or not, I went to capture in Moviestar and recorded all of my videos and after they were done(before rendering), I used Windows Media Player and played the videos with sound. I have a Toshiba 1005-S157 notebook that i used to make the videos. I never rendered the videos and I have full sound. On the other hand I tried playing them on my other 2 pc's and windows media player said that they were an unsupported type.
They are in "Mpeg1" format, and I burned a VCD of one and my DVD/VCD player did nothing. Another thing, I click on the capture video and select the media type I want and click render, and nothing happens. How odd is this? Can I use MGI Video Wave to capture the video using the DCS200?
Any answers would be greatly appreciated.

John

[tharris]

John -

Windows MediaPlayer 7.1, which is the latest version as far as I know, would only play the native MovieStar files (I believe they have the extension .mzl) without sound. I had the same result with MediaStudio Pro 6. I also tried creating a VCD and SVCD with Ulead's Movie Factory and while it could import the file, no sound would play with the native MovieStar .mzl capture file.

MovieStar would play them with sound but the other external applications could not until the file was produced/rendered from MovieStar.

I don't know what is different about your system but with mine and others that have commented on this card in the Capture Cards section of this site had the same experience.

I never ran into the glitch you describe about clicking on render in MovieStar and nothing happening - in my case, MovieStar would render the file (although the render time actually took longer than going from AVI to MPEG). It sounds like MovieStar isn't working quite right for you in this case because it did render for me. I never tried capturing with the Creation Station outside of MovieStar so I can't speak to the MGI VideoWave question.

After all of the glitches and everything else that didn't work quite right, which was similar to the results I was getting with the Dazzle DVC but the DVC never had as many problems, it basically came down to wrestling with all of the nits/glitches vs. focusing on editing the video.

I wanted to spend my time working on the video and not fighting the process and system. The only process that produced good and predictable results was to capture DV AVI, edit the AVI video, and only then render to VCD or SVCD MPEG.

[The village idiot]

After all of the glitches and everything else that didn't work quite right, which was similar to the results I was getting with the Dazzle DVC but the DVC never had as many problems, it basically came down to wrestling with all of the nits/glitches vs. focusing on editing the video.

I wanted to spend my time working on the video and not fighting the process and system. The only process that produced good and predictable results was to capture DV AVI, edit the AVI video, and only then render to VCD or SVCD MPEG.

Me too, only using the DVC2 and DCS-200. Ended up with a Hollywood DV Bridge. Just wish I had a faster CPU.

[mol3000]

i read the reviews.... and its seems that it is not a hardware but more software problem..... has anyone tried a different software to try to capture it....... like movie factory or primere????? i no it cant be configured to work wit just one software

[The village idiot]

I tried with Movie factory and DVD workshop... no luck.

[redwudz]

I've been using the DVC 200 for about a month. The raw audio is LPCM (Linear PCM?). I understand this is a DVD format, but since I don't have a DVD burner, I haven't confirmed this. I have yet to find any program other than Moviestar that can control the unit. The raw video and audio does play on WinPlayer 6.4.9.110 and after copying it to a cd I played it on an APEX 1500 DVD player with the audio set to A0. The card does capture well, but the rendered video is blocky and grainy, at least as a SVCD. It is probably a good choice for old VHS tape transfers as it seems to lock into even poor quality recordings. I just got the new version of MovieStar 5 (5.1.4.0) and it works a little better than the software it came with. There is a website about the unit you might check out, http://pub23.ezboard.com/bdazzledigitalvideo. The raw output is incompatible with most encoders. I have tried to convert it with graphedit, but TMPGnc doesn't like it and if you do get it encoded, the audio is out of sync. I'm still learning about this unit, but if you have a fast computer and a large HD, I would recommend a avi capture card and either a TMPGnc or CCE for the encode.

[John Pilkinton]

THarris,

Oh, I forgot you have to read the manual sometimes. I figured out what I did. I just started capturing a movie and when it got done recording, I thought that was the final product. Turns out I have to go to Edit and and then Produce. See what happens when you don't read the instructions?????
Now I see all of the problems ya'll are having with this thingy..
I've tried to log on to Dazzle's FTP site for the upgrade of Moviestar but for some reason it was screwing up. The quality of the caps(before edit & produce) were great, except for the size.
As far as my laptop specs, It's just a basic laptop with XP on it. I don't think I have any 'special' drivers. Beats the heck out of me.

[John Pilkinton]

OK, I created some VCD's with the DVD CS-200 and the quality was outstanding. The video and audio was right on track with each other.
When rendering a 60 minute video, it took about 80-90 minutes for the finished mpg file. I have tried the dvd capture, but i was running out of disk space(awesome quality from VHS). Now to get a dvd burner.
I did have to restart moviestar a couple of times, but it don't take long to restart.
The DVD CS-200 gets a perfect score with me.

[Mxjshaf69]

If you are having troubles with the software you just need to order the disk from dazzle(it is free) and it will work good.