By Terry Currier
The AVerDVD EZMaker from AverMedia is used to capture movies directly from a video camera, or VCR through either a composite video port (RCA jack), or S-Video plug. You can get sound in from a sound card. You can also capture TV output Perhaps I should tell you right away I don’t have a DVD burner. So, why would I be interested in this? Well it works the same way on a CD-ROM burner. By the way, with video files on a CD they call it a VCD.
They use neoDVDstandard 4.0 software from MedioStream for making the conversion. The card comes with a one year warranty. Users can capture video from any analog source and save it to a hard drive, DVD, or VCD with MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 quality and resolution up to 720x480.
|
|
Installing was very easy, put the card in, and it came up
right away looking for the installation files.
Hooked up a RCA jack cable to my
camera and the card, and I was ready to
go. With the
neoDVDstandard software the user can easily capture the video and
do a one step process of
burning it directly to a DVD, or VCD. You can also
save it to a hard drive until you’re ready to
burn a disk.
You can create a menu with titles for different chapters. A
thumbnail image is automatically created for each chapter. A chapter being each
capture or MPEG you add. Choose from 15 different background images, along with
11 types of frames. Their nine step wizard walks you through the choices and
gives you a preview of how it will look. You can add or delete clips onto the same
DVD. It will also let you import DV, AVI, QuickTime, and MPEG files directly
into it. So any of those shows you’ve recorded from your AverTV card you can
bring in. You can also do audio overlays onto a video clip.
Don’t expect to cut or add scenes within a capture though. If you want to edit parts within a video you will need a more powerful program. It will do NTSC/PAL conversion.
How much space will this take? Well I record/captured 8 minutes which turned out to be a MPEG file at 292Mb. When converted it takes less space. AverMedia says you can put up to one hour onto a 700Mb VCD (MPEG-1), and up to 3 hours and 20 minutes onto a DVD (MPEG-2). Just remember, if you do record first to the hard drive you will need a lot of free space.
You can also copy DVD’s on to another DVD but it will not by pass the copy protection. This make it’s easy covert those old video tapes you have on to a DVD, and at $50 it is a good buy. AverMedia (408) 263-3828 www.aver.com
Membership in WINNERS is $20 annually for individuals with $5 for each additional family member. The newsletter is emailed to the members in PDF format.
 |
Winners is a member of the Association of Personal Computer User Groups (APCUG) is an international, platform-independent, nonprofit corporation (incorporated in Washington, DC) devoted to helping user groups throughout the world. Almost 400 user groups are members of APCUG. http://www.apcug.net/ |
