[Ti] Dazzle Hollywood ?

[Pete Zimowski]

> Does anyone have any experiences, positive or otherwise, of pulling
> analogue video onto their TiBook for editing and making VCD's and/or
> DVD's ?
> 
> I'm looking at the Hollywood product from Dazzle, at $300, which
> converts analogue to FireWire. This seems to be marketed mainly as a
> PC prodduct and Mac OS info on their WWW site is less than helpful.
> It looks like the perfect solution but has anyone here used this
> successfully with a TiBook, Mac OS X and iMovie, I wonder ?
> 
> Are there any other similar products, either analogue to FireWire or
> perhaps a PCMCIA analogue video capture card, which I should know
> about ?

Paul,

I bought a Dazzle Hollywood DV Bridge, for $299, several years ago.  I
immediately put it to work making an hour-long video of a friend of mine's
bike ride from SFO to LA for charity.  I had an old Sony 8mm analog video
camera and a bunch of stills and mp3s and off I went.  At the time I didn't
have a DV-capable desktop (Beige 266 G3), so I had to do the whole show on
my Ti500.  I did the majority of the work "on the road" (I am an airline
pilot) in hotel rooms - digitizing, editing, etc.  Because of the
by-today's-standards small 20GB on my Ti500, I bought a 20GB QPS portable
firewire drive, which I think runs at a whopping 4200 RPM.

Anyway, the Dazzle DV Bridge worked as advertised, although you have to get
the analog video input started, then click a button that steps through the
three settings to the Analog-DV setting to get the right video/audio signal.
Others have experienced this as well.  I discovered one limitation that I
had to work around - to get good quality, stutter-free digitizing I had to
capture directly to the internal Ti500 hard drive.  I couldn't put the
firewire output from the DV Bridge into the portable 20GB and then chain it
with firewire to the TiBook.  Once digitized, I could store and edit from
the portable 20GB OK.

There is no software required to use the DV Bridge on a Mac.  It worked just
fine with iMovie (as well as Final Cut Pro on both the Ti500 and
Quicksilver).  One thing to note - there is a dark, 5 pixel frame around
every bit of analog video, whether from camera or VCR, that I have ever
digitized.  I happen to have Cleaner, and I use this to remove the dark
frame.

As far as other digitizing devices, Sony and Formac both make them, but I
think they are more expensive.  I have used someone else's Sony box and it
doesn't have the "button-stepping" quirk, but it still leaves the border.

The only way I think you can really go wrong with this is to get some
solution that uses USB.  Don't even think about it, no matter how cheap.

By the way, the DV Bridge does just fine dumping back out the analog VCRs..

Hope this helps.

Pete