The device has connectors for left and right audio in for stereo sound, a video in, and an S-Video in for better video quality. It connects to your computer through a USB port. If you have the older USB 1 system, you will notice it’s limitations. It does work, just slowly. The new USB 2 is much faster, and makes working with this much faster. 

Besides editing video on your PC, you can also send video e-mails, Webcast streaming video, add video to presentations, and transfer old videos to CD. This version of Dazzle does have limitations, and there are two other, more expensive versions that do much more. Digital Video Creator allows output to a VCR/TV, has a more advanced software suite, and has real time MPEG-1 compression. Digital Video Creator II upgrades to real time MPEG-2 compression and DVD software.

For a slightly different test, I decided to hook this up to a television, and a game machine. You can use this to connect to a television through a VCR. Simply hook the Dazzle between the VCR and your computer. I used the included software, MGI VideoWave 4, and had a small window to watch TV. The drawback is size. Since this is not really designed to do this, you cannot expect the same quality as a TV tuner card. The game experiment worked even better.  

I hooked up the Dazzle to my nephew’s machine, a necessity since I am not much of a game enthusiast. The game is Resident Evil on a Nintendo GameCube model DOL-001(USA). We took a 48.5 second capture, doing 320x240 @ 30 fps using NTSC_M standard and YU2 color space. We had to raise brightness level a bit  —  it was too dark using default. Sound is CD quality (44.1Khz, 16 bit, Stereo), using "DVC 80 Audio Capture (2)" for capture device. The file is over 227 MBs (227,495,424 bytes). It wasn’t compressed. The file command under Linux shows it as "RIFF (little-endian) data, AVI". Yes, we played around with Linux also! Capture was real time  —  though it does have a slight pause (probably no more than a second) after stopping, though I think that may just be from it switching back to “non capture mode”. It refreshes the preview screen when you start capturing and when you stop.

It was connected using composite from the analog output on the game system. We didn’t have a digital or S-Video cable for the system, so couldn’t test S-Video.

I’ve attached a screenshot from the video capture. The video was being played back in media player  —  just cropped the video out  —  didn’t get screen captures from VideoWave as we had hardware acceleration enabled and it wouldn’t let me capture them. We disabled hardware acceleration after we unhooked the game system and took it. 

The program also has video editing features. You can add text to the video.. it has a few preset motions like credit roll, banner.. you can have it fade in and out, give it a shadow, change transparency, color, thickness, position. . .

Other video options include image blend.. blending one scene into another (I think), and shadow effects. Again, I’m not sure what that does. We are still trying to figure out how to use it. Both give options on how to display it if you want it to blend from the center out, from bottom to top, etc. It has a special effects section, where you can add swirls, 'spherize', brighten, tile, make a relief and add ripple effects. There’s a 'dark room' section where you can change contrast, etc. giving it the look of a black & white film, or an old fashioned video; give it warmer/cooler color, etc. You can combine clips, and add transition effects. It has about 20 preset motions like cut, dissolve, reveal up/down, slide left/right, corner wipe from top to bottom/left to right. 

You can edit sound, add sound effects, add CD audio as it gives you the option of fading in and out, changing volume. It has an 'output to video' option which gives full screen playback of captured video for outputting to TV or VCR. This doesn’t give full screen (or any size past 320x240 or something slightly higher) during capture, nor does it give sound, so it does not work like a TV tuner card.

With the increasing popularity of home videos, and the ‘net, families are sharing videos over the ‘net. This has so many uses, it is a worthwhile addition to your video-PC equipment. We really had no problems with Dazzle, but I might recommend moving up to one of the more capable versions to get the output for TV-VCR for even more versatility. 

You can upload your videos to a Website from Dazzle for family and friends to view. It is a freebie, and can be viewed at http://dazzle.mightyeyes.com. We did not try this out, but there are other products that do this, so it is a common use of this type device.

We tested this on a machine running both Windows 98 and Linux, with a 1.1GHz Athlon, and 128MB RAM, and a 64MB GeForce video card. The rest is not as important as these three items. The one complaint I have is the Dazzle Website. It requires the Flash plug-in to function. I have this disabled, along with a number of other plug-ins. They slow down my usage of a Website, slow down my machine, and are, in general, a pain in the backside! If they were properly designed, and ran under an OS that was more functional, it might be okay. Such is not currently the case. 

System requirements: 300MHz or faster Pentium II class CPU, Windows 98 or higher, 64MB RAM , Sound card to include sound, Speakers or headphones for sound, SVGA video card with a minimum 4MB RAM with minimum display rate of 1024x768 at 16 bit, USB.

Dazzle is generally available, although it is not stocked in large quantities, so may have to be ordered. The price runs around $69.99. Check out Dazzle 80, and look at demos available there. All in all, a nice product.
 

Dazzle Incorporated
47211 Bayside Parkway
Fremont, CA 94538