Dazzle Video Creator Platinum

• Quick to Connect
• Simple to use
• Easy Archive
• Fun to Share
• Effortless to Edit

I bought this to capture high school basketball games from old VHS tapes, edit them on my PC, then create multiple DVDs of the result. It worked very quickly and easily. The conversion from VHS to PC was a piece of cake: plug and play. The "capture" process presented frames for fine editting done just by sliding frame brackets. Didn't play much with titles, captions etc, but I will soon. Then created multiple DVD copies of the final editted "movie" I created just kept feeding in blank DVDs and pressing "go". Also copied VHS tapes directly to my PC DVD-writer and that was fast and simple as well. I am delighted with the simplicity. Of course separately I did have to buy a DVD burner for my Dell laptop, cuz I didn't have one before. But now I am all set to move all my home movies from VHS and video camera, for editing on my PC, to write to DVD.

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This is a response to critics. I carefully read the reviews of Pinnacle Studio 10, which this package comes with, and negative comments on Pinnalce support, on the various venues on Amazon.com. So I almost didn't buy this. But I'm glad I took the chance. To be sure, I haven't yet actually got to the point of burning the DVD, only capturing. But the installation and the capturing (from VHS) and editing I've done so far have been perfectly smooth and incredibly easy. And Pinnalce support live chat -was prompt. It turns out that the problem I had wasn't with the software or PC at all, but with my VCR (the right stereo channel did not output). I don't know the specs of the Gateway I'm using except that it has 1 MB of ram, which I suspect is really what one needs. Video capturing programs take a lot of a PC's resources like gaming programs do. Overall, I find the software very easy to learn and use. I get the sense that most of the people who write reviews are the disgruntled, not the pleased. In fact, I'm writing this because, despite the critics, I'm impressed with just how easy it is to piece together and edit (create menus) from different video sources. If I have a problem with burning, I'll write again.

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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!

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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.

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.