Freshly Squeezed Reviews: A .mov is worth a thousand words
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Aug 19, 2008 at 4:12pm
The song remains the same. You memories are on out dated media that you would like to move up to the latest and greatest. In the 70’s, it was Super 8 film to VHS tape. Today it’s VHS tape to digital. So, of course, you’ll need something to convert all these happy times.
Product: Pinnacle Video System
Company: Pinnacle
Requirements: Mac OS X 10.4 or later; Macintosh computer with a Power PC G4 (500MHz or faster), G5 or Intel Core processor; 256MB of RAM, 512MB recommended
Price: US$99.99
“A fast, simple way to transfer analog video from a camcorder or any other source to your Mac® in an iPod-native format. Macintosh video capture has never been so easy. You can record video from any analog source, including a camcorder, set-top box, game console or VCR. The hardware MPEG-4 encoder frees up your Mac’s processor for other tasks. Videos are added automatically to iTunes®, ready to sync with an iPod® or Apple TV™.”
Y’mean I can transfer media with no fuss or muss? This I want to see.
The Juice
Video Capture involves both hardware and software. The hardware with two RCA inputs for audio and your choice of either an RCA jack plus an S-Video jack for video. At the other end is a USB (2.0 or 1.1) plug for your computer. The software capture program (a/k/a Dazzle) was designed to work with this particular piece of hardware.
The process went without a hiccup. Hook up is simple enough and the installation software is equally as easy. The only real choice you make, other buying it, is do you feed your video as composite or S-VIDEO. My old VHS player (redundancy) only has composite out and no S-Video, so I can only imagine what the S-Video looks like. You can also convert or manage video for your iPod plus video, audio and photos for the Sony PSP
Support consists of forums, a help viewer and a contact address. But because the program is so simple, you most likely won’t even need those.
I used an old tape of The Drew Carey Show for my test. This is a subjective point, but I swear that it was so crisp. I was able to use the clip on The Video Sandbox. I have to pick up a VHS player with S-Video out for the rest of my tapes.
The Pulp
Nada.
The Rind
Nada.
Summary
Avid’s Pinnacle Video Capture is worth every penny. Avid is a name that has been the benchmark for video for a long, long time. And from my tests, they brought the same kind of quality of their professional line of products to their consumer line.
I highly recommend that you surf over to their site as fast as you can, to check out their editing packages, studio FX and viewing solutions (which are made specifically made for their editing software).
Now, is there a green way to dispose of videotape?
Macsimum rating : 9 of 10
©2008 Frank Petrie
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Contributor
Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 4,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
