Video-Capture Reviews

If your low on cash,this is the camera for you,it works,but has some problems at times,it captures images very well,getting it to find your default email program like Outlook in Windows 98 is always a maybe,Check for updates aftr you brush your teeth each day!At least brush your teeth!You'll look nicer on your camera!If you find some money spend a few extra bucks for a better Logitech Camera;Don't forget to floss!WC

The QuickCam Web is a decent camera. I was suprised at the clarity of the images - even when used in low light. It comes with a lot of neat software, including time lapse photography, games, and frame-by-frame animation tools. The built-in mic also sounds pretty good for its size. However, I had a few significant problems with the camera's drivers.

When I first installed the QuickCam on my Compaq Presario 5600, the shortcut buttons on my keyboard (including the volume controls) stopped working, and I experienced a few other problems. I didn't realize these were caused by the camera until a friend borrowed it and had the same symptoms. She contacted support, and they acknowledged that the trouble could caused by the camera's drivers. (I know this problem could be unique to computers with shortcut keys, but I have to take a star off the product rating for driver conflicts like this one.)

I don't mean to discourage anyone from buying this camera; it is a lot of fun to use, reasonably priced, and Logitech may have released new drivers with the camera since I bought mine almost two years ago. Just make sure you have the newest drivers before you install it! I'm a big fan of Logitech's products (my keyboard and mouse are Logitech,) and this is the only one I've ever had problems with.

Very good product...It's very worth the price. It's very easy to set up my webcam with my sever, send video e-mails, and take quality pictures. Though we did have a problem. We bought 2 of the product and we tried to make video calls with NetMeeting and no luck. Plus, NetMeeting took a very long time to setup. You had to download MSN Messanger, sign up with Hotmail for a name and then final do the call. No luck at all. But over all it's very usefull.

I have a Mac G4/400, well within the requirements of this device. I hooked up my analog camcorder and tried to import to my Mac - choppy audio and slide-show video. This is not how the device is advertised and I was extremely perturbed.

I used the software included, tried it in Classic and in OS X, and tried iMovie and any other type of import software I could find, and all results were the same.

I threw it in a drawer and finally invested in a product that works as advertised, the Dazzle Hollywood DV-bridge (sold here on Amazon).

Don't waste your money on this glorified dust collector!

I use my XLR8 USB-XIVN with my iBook for still capture from video and as a webcam. Download the updated driver and the device lets you use your video camera as a high-quality webcam in all the videoconferencing software I've tried it with.

Only problem is that it doesn't add audio input via USB, it depends on your mic input, something an iBook doesn't have.

Can't beat the price!

This is an excellent value. It is the full retail package of XLR8 Interview including Strata VideoShop 4.5 and all the other bundled software. The USB connector has both the RCA video connection and S-Video connection. The package also includes a cable for connecting stereo sound to the Macintosh microphone input jack. After you get it, download the free update to Interview 2.0 from the XLR8 site and the VideoShop 4.5.1 free update from their web site. Minimum system requirement is a G3 233 mhz Mac with a USB connection.

The DV500 is a very picky piece of hardware. I have yet to get it working as advertised in my system, a system I hand built around Pinnacle's specifications. The configuration guide sent to my by Pinnacle explains that the DV500 will only work in one specific PCI slot, and then only if it is forced to a certain set of IRQs, (it uses 3 IRQs). It also requires an older, outdated set system drivers, drivers that are not directly related to the DV500. Even with a system build and configured precisely to Pinnacle standards, the DV500 will not output the realtime effects, and will not output video via the FireWire. I'm not new to video editing, and have never needed tech help for anything, until I bought the DV500. A better bet: by a $50 firewire card, and a good video editing program.

I recently purchased the DV500+ after extensively researching lower and higher priced units. My intent was to handle the following tasks: (1) analog capture of VHS tapes and other sources, (2) transfer/editing of DV tapes from a camcorder, and (3) archiving of video onto CD-R. The DV500+ handles all of the above, although it's ability to archive video at low bit rates (e.g. MPEG-1 or SVCD-compliant MPEG-2) requires use of freeware from the internet....

My previous video capture solutions were ATI All-in-wonder cards, both the 128 and Radeon versions. Although the ATI multipurpose display/video capture card is good for the money, you cannot reliably capture very high bit rate video streams without jumping through lots of hoops. The DV500+, on the other hand, has been rock solid in capturing analog video in DV format with no dropped frames over hour+ captures. The included software package is great.. Premiere 6 is the pinnacle of Windows-based non-linear video editing. I am still playing with the other items including the title editor, 3D renderer, DVD menu/clip editor, etc. The DV500+ is not as "real-time" as the Matrox RT2500 which is its main competition, but it's at least ... cheaper and may have more trouble-free installation. If you need MPEG-2 editing and capture, think about the RT2500 since the DV500+ only captures in DV format but allows later transcoding to MPEG-2.

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Hello Digital Friends, If you are looking for an affordable solution for your Digital Camcorders, this is the one for you.I'm a MBA graduate from Hyderabad, INDIA and during my college time I used to make movies of all the events in our college. I made my first movie on the farewell function of my seniors. I have Sony DCR-VX1000 Handycam which have the facility for I-Link digital output. The greatness of Digital output is that you can produce broadcast quality video from this. Especially if you have handycams with 3CCD's which means state-of-the-art video quality which only films can produce. Pinnacle DV500 contains good tools for all your needs. Titling, effects, digital narration, transitions and real time editing. This helps to transfer your movie from camera to computer hard disk and edit. you can save the out put in different formats. like avi, mpeg, streaming movie for web, CDROM, DVD and more... these options are rarely found in any package. All the home movie makers and professionals can use this.Any help regarding digital camcorders and DV500 i'm willing. Get to me at gopinathkoneti@yahoo.com

I reccommend that you do not buy this product. When you use it for TV reception, to watch VCR tapes, or to play games with a console system the picture is terrible. You would be better off buying a television for the same price as it would look much better. When I tried to watch any shows the poor picture and color quality along with the distortions on the screen gave me a terrible headache. I returned this product the same day I recieved it as it was a waste of money.

Great card u have all the features as your TV on the monitor!
125 Channel very simple to use and to install.
Cheap price, best buy!

The install CD would not work. It errors about not being able to find data1.cab. That is because it is also trying to write to the CD! I copied the CD to hard drive and attempted to install from there. It installed.

The drivers did not work. Not at all. No picture, no audio. Nothing.

The uninstall would NOT uninstall the software. I had to do a complete system restore.

Worst product in existence.

So you're looking to transfer your VHS tapes to DVD right? Perhaps watch a little TV on your PC? Let me share some advice - do not buy one of those external USB-driven video capture devices - they basically stink.

Get yourself a PCI TV tuner/video capture card, install it in your PC in 10 minutes and discover what a true video media center is like.

This product delivers sharp video and syncronized audio with outstanding ULead video capture/editing/burning software included. Dazzle Video Creator 80 and Adaptec Videoh! DVD Media Center USB 2.0 Edition failed miserably with a combination of poor software, unknown errors (that's what it said, I kid you not) that crashed the capture and failed audio capture. I captured video from both an analog VCR and my old Sony 8mm camcorder with fantastic results. Built-in MPEG-2 decoder resulted in high bit-rated video transfer that improved the quality of my recordings.

The TV tuner aspect of this card is fantastic. Crisp clear TV in full screen mode with my 17" LCD monitor. Convenient remote lets you change channels with barely a delay. Record TV programs using the scheduler right to your hard drive to watch or burn later.

My PC: Intel P4 3.06 GHz/120GB WD HD/1024 MB Micron PC3200 DDR RAM/TurtleBeach Santa Cruz sound card/ATI Radeon 9200 256MB vid card so I easily had plenty of juice to run this product to its max potential. Make sure you have a system with a good enuf processor and RAM to run this for video editing.

Additional ideas purchased to make this work: Gold-plated splitter from Radio Shack to run cable modem and TV tuner at same time off same coax cable line. Convertor cable that converts 2 audio RCA connectors to standard 1/8" audio input connector (which this PCI card uses). Total of additional items: $15

I bought the unit to help me convert about 20 years of VHS home movies to DVD. Although the unit can convert analog to mpeg2 on the fly the quality is not as good as just bringing in digital video and compressing it with cheap software. Many of the menus run very slow and a preview box seems to have sound with no video. When I hit the internet help link I receive a message that that site is no longer there. The hardware seems to work well for bringing in analog signals to digital thru USB but the software could use some work. I was able to do the software upgrades online.

Installation of this device was easy and it works well. However, picture captured by computer is much lighter than that on my camcorder. Am I using it wrongly or this is all that the device can do?
Dazzle talks about free service which is a joke. When you call machine tells you to call another number where you can get service for a fee. For free service, they let you hang on forever. I called and held phone for ten minutes without an answer.
Try it at you own risk.

the printer gave very good results, but see no need for all the insturction books, (2) that come with the printer. Everything said could surly be condensed to one simple to read and use set of insturctions. there should be a better system to tell what you are going to print before you print it.

This printer is designed for one task- printing 4x6 color images. It's not real fast or real cheap but it is very easy to use and the quality of the prints is comparable to conventional photos. This printer is particularly useful if you use your digital camera as a replacement for a point-and-shoot, and you want to be able to get good, quick prints with a mimimum of fuss. Individual prints are probably more expensive than conventional photos but you don't pay for printing pictures you don't want, so in the end it's probably more cost effective. Compared to ink-jet printers, it's clearly less versitile, but you don't have to remember to load special paper or make special settings, and you won't run out of ink in the middle of a print job, as each paper pack comes with a print cartridge that runs out when the paper does.

This is not an Office printer. It print as good as a 35mm film camera does. Do not expect any thing else. Small paper high cost but best picture that U can get.

I tried to pair the card in this package with the new Maxtor 5000DV. The Pinnacle card toasts the Maxtor drive every time. Maxtor customer service can replicate my error and has been very helpful. Pinnacle customer service has been sarcastic, irresponsible, and completely unhelpful.

The Pinnacle software only offers minor improvements over my existing software, so I'm out [$$$] and have a worthless Pinnacle package sitting in the closet.

Don't buy from Pinnacle until they get their customer service reps up to snuff!

I bought this software over a year ago to edit video from my Sony Digital 8 camera.

Installation:
It took me close to 3 months to setup because of issues between Windows ME and the included FireWire card. I actually had to hack the Microsoft drivers .INF file to get the card to work properly on my system.

User Interface
The software is amazing easy to use. The user interface is very intuitive.

To capture, hookup your Digital camcorder to the Firewire card with the included cable. You just say you want to record and up to 15 minutes of video is transfered at a time. This is due to a limit in the size of AVI files.

The system is capable of automatically sensing scene breaks, so when it captures, it automatically organizes scenes.

For editing, it just have to arrange the scenes. You can also shorten the scenes through again a very good UI.

The software has 3 voice tracks. You can easily add music from MP3s or CDs to your video. You can also do voiceovers ( I haven't tried this yet ).

If you are making DVDs, you can add chapters and menus. The UI for doing this is pretty good as well.

You can also add stills. I've made many videos which are combination of video and stills pictues from a digital camera

The software comes with many transitions. You can do fads and other cool effects.

You can output your movie to DVD, S-VCD, VCD, RealNetworks, Microsoft Media Player Format, or MPEG ( No Quicktime support ).

Now the bad: The software has been very unreliable, at times, I lost hours of work. Anyone who looks at the message boards will see that the user base of this software is generally unhappy. I seem to finally have a patch that has made the software reasonable reliable. I can honestly say that I love the software but have never been so frustrated with the qauality of a piece of software before. When it works its really good, but it doesn't always work.

Because of the unreliability of the software, I would not recommend it to a computer novice.

I had already ordered Pinnacle Studio DV from Dell when I started reading all of the horrible reviews. I bought the program after seeing some DVDs that my boss made of his son's football games & he said he had no problems. When it arrived I decided to try it and hope for the best & I'm glad I did. I captured about 90 minutes of video that I had shot using a Sony TRV-350. The capture process when very smoothly. Editing confused me at first (I didn't want to read the manual) but I caught on quickly and edited the video down to about 30 minutes of scenes that I wanted to burn to DVD. The rendering process did take a while: 30 to 45 minutes but when it was done my dvd drive spit out a completed dvd with the titles and transitions that I added and it looked great when I played it in by DVD player. I had no problems at all during the entire process including installation. I did follow Pinnacle's recommendations and bought a separate hard drive for capturing and I made sure no other applications were running in XP. I am very pleased with the product. I do have a new system: Dell 4600, 2.6ghz P4, 512 RAM, 40 GB internal, 80GB Western Digital firewire external hardrive (I used the card that came with Pinnacle for the firewire connection as the Dell 4600 didn' have one - the Pinnacle card comes with two connections one of which you must use for your digital camcorder). I am very pleased with this product.

Well it's pretty obvious "A proud Dazzle owner" probably works for Dazzle or some affiliated company. Judging by the language alone, you can tell its more of an advertisement than a casual customer review. This is simply a bad product. Dazzle made bad capturing devices in the past, and still does now. This product is buggy, prone to crashes, and arbitrarily (if ever) works.

I'm a network admin and I would consider myself pretty technically competant, and still had one helluva time getting this product to operate properly. Its not that the installation process is troublesome, on the contrary - the installation went fine but still it would work for moments then stop. 75% of the time it would not capture, it would lock up and crash. Within the 25% of the time that it worked - the audio would go mute after a minute, the audio would go out of sync, or it would stop capturing at an random point.

Just to give this product a chance, i tested this on all 3 of my machines at home. The OS of the machines are XP, ME, and 2k. All machines over 2ghz, 512ram, and with 7200rpm ide drives or scsi ultrastar 10k drives. 3 different machines with different video cards and OS's. Same problems with this product on all machines. Its a piece of crap, save your time and the 15% restocking fee.

Despite the rant from the fellow from Singapore (about the Snazzi - a totally different product) the Dazzle is marvelously easy to use and gives better than average video quality. Read on...
It took me all of 15 minutes to follow the simple directions (including pictures) to hook up the Dazzle and begin capturing video to my hard drive.
The first time around I used the "default" settings and the results were extremely gratifying. Less than an hour after opening the box I was sending off an email to my parents (the proud grandparents) with a video attachment that warmed their hearts. It truly was a snap.
Then I started playing around with the settings and found that I could produce some pretty hi-quality video that I have since used in a CD presentation. The comments I got after the presentation were: "How'd you get that video in their?" and "Tell me where you got that Dazzle!"
Keep in mind that (1) capturing video requires a fairly strong machine (they say a Pentium 133 is minimum, but I'm not sure that would be enough computer) and (2) MPEG video takes up alot of room on your hard drive and takes a long time to send over the internet. (A 7 second clip of video took 4 minutes to download as an email attachment.) But grandma says, "It was worth every second! Send me more!"

i lost my cd software for the dazzle digital video creator parallel port creator dm 4000 how can get the software need help

Pinnacle Systems makes some of the best editing software in the industry, but this product is seriously lacking in hardware capabilities. The maximum capture resolution is 160x120, although you can resize it to 320x240 (but with no increase in resolution). Also, the process to create a tape is ridiculously hard. You can ONLY use a LANC, Panasonic 5-Pin, or Infrared Camcorder. Unlike most systems, Studio 400 doesn't even support a regular VCR. (You need a LANC or 5-Pin VCR, only common in Europe!) You need to hook up the source camcorder, a VCR, the Studio Mixer, your PC, and the SmartCable. Even with delay testing, the final tapes look [terrible]. They are choppy and often have mistakes. Also, it takes several hours to make a 20 minute tape on most camcorders. Even worse, this system worked on my old system (Win98 1st Edition), but failed to work on my new system (Win ME), an office computer (Win 98 2nd Edition, and a friend's computer (Win 2000). Finally, you don't even get everything you need in the box- I needed to purchase 2 RCA mini-patch cables, and if you have a Panasonic camcorder you need to mail-order for a converter. After spending hours working on my US History project, Studio 400 DIDN'T WORK! I ended up having to create a fuzzy 160x120 file and recording that fullscreen....

This is a good and bad product. My main problem is the same as that of the previous reviewer...namely that the sync capacity is awfully wonky. I had it working on my old computer, but when I reinstalled it on the new I can't get it to operate properly and have tried to get help, without success, from their help division. They made prompt suggestions, but it didn't fix the problem. What is frustrating is that they helped the same glitch on my old computer, but can't this time. So the transitions are very much off, so you don't want to use it for spot on editing.

I think this is a great product for the price that you pay. I have been using it for a while and I am very happy with it.