Pinnacle Dazzle 150

Most digital camcorders have USB 2.0 connectivity, which is fast enough to encode a video from the camcorder in real time. But is your machine fast enough for the job at hand? May not be, which is one of the reasons that the voice goes out of sync in most cases or you get frame drops. This is where the Dazzle video converter comes in. It comes in three variants-Dazzle 90, Dazzle 120 and Dazzle 150. We've reviewed the 150-the highest end version supporting an encoder chip and USB 2.0.

Though we tested it for encoding from a camcorder, you can use any device that supports analog output such as a VCR, TV or even a DVD player. The device setup was as simple as it can get. We installed the bundled Pinnacle Studio Quick Start, which is a stripped down version of Pinnacle Studio 9, connected the device and we were ready to capture. The software is a dream to work with, being an out-of-the-box video-editing and

DVD-authoring solution. It also allows you to save video in various formats as well as author your own VCDs and

DVDs. 

On the performance front, we didn't face any frame drops or lip sync errors in all formats that we encoded the video in. But, we were not able to capture video using Windows Movie Maker, which just couldn't detect the hardware and kept crashing.

The Bottom Line: A video capture card with hardware capturing capabilities. Could do better if it were integrated with Windows Movie Maker.

Geetaj Channana