Sights and Sounds of Multimedia

By George Harding

Dazzle DVD Recorder …

This product has but one use, but that use is beautifully executed by this product!

It’s designed to make very simple the process of transferring your analog recording to DVD. One process, very simple.

Before you install any hardware, you must install the software. In my case, it didn’t need a Windows restart (yea!). The installation takes a while. Not surprising, since the software occupies 1 GB of space!

After the software installation, you hook up your analog source (in my case an analog video camera, but it could be a VHS tape) to the Dazzle DVD Recorder, then plug it into a USB port (2.0 please!). Your DVD drive must be on and ready to use.

Next, you start Pinnacle Instant DVD Recorder. The first menu shows your video source, the next the output choice. You have the option to insert menus every so many minutes, but I did not try that. The next window has a view of your analog source beginning and a couple of options from which to choose.

Video quality is one of the choices, being Good, Better and Best. Each has a number of minutes of recording time associated with that choice. Best, for example has a maximum of 170 minutes. That’s the one I chose.

The other choice to make is the number of minutes of recording time. This relates to your analog source program. You probably know about how long it lasts.

Then you click ‘Start Recording’ and away you go! It makes a DVD as it reads the video source.

The product bypasses the usual step of first recording to your hard drive, and eliminates the problem of running out of space.

My first try was a mixed success. The video recorded flawlessly, but the sound was too low to hear and could not be amplified, at least on my computer. There is a slider in the software for volume, but it is set at 100%, so that wasn’t the reason. The Help file contains no help for sound problems.

I tried the Support section on Pinnacle’s web site, but found no solution to my problem. I think the original sound track from my camera was probably too low to record properly.

I had another problem that was most annoying! When starting the Dazzle software, my mouse pointer would only move every few seconds. I would move the physical mouse, but the pointer did not move for a while. So I would move the physical mouse again. When the pointer finally moved, I would end up overshooting the intended target. Most frustrating!

Then, too, when I went to save a file (a screen print of the Dazzle menu), I could not change the file name because I couldn’t get the pointer to target that section of the Save As dialog, and when I finally did click there, the name I typed wound up being some 50 characters long instead of the three I typed! Forget it!

It appears that the software has so much going on that the CPU is virtually overloaded with activity.

The box contains a colorful piece of hardware, the unit that accepts the analog video input and the audio and sends it to your USB port. There are no moving parts or switch selections – it’s about as simple as hardware can be made.

The product comes with two bonus DVDs of software: Pinnacle Studio Quickstart and Bonus DVD. The Quickstart program is what you can use to modify and improve the DVD you made. You can edit, cut, make titles and insert transitions, for example. The Bonus DVD has audio and video material you can work on to try out the Quickstart program.

I found this product to be very easy to install, very easy to use and to produce a quality DVD (if the source is quality).

Dazzle DVD Recorder by Pinnacle Systems www.pinnaclesys.com Price $50

Requires WIN XP or higher, P4 1.4 GHz (2.4 GHz recommended), 512 MB RAM (1 GB recommended), 1 GB hard disk space for software, 3 GB for bonus content, USB 2.0 port, DVD burner