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Pinnacle Video Capture published in ComputorEdge online November 14, 2008 Razzle Dazzle your VCR tapes Equipment for digitizing analog media can be a seriously expensive and labor-intensive proposition for hobbyists. This is where Pinnacle Video Capture for Macintosh fits in. Pinnacle Video Capture for Macintosh is a consumer-level analog-to-digital conversion package that encodes audio-visual recordings—such as homemade flicks—into MPEG-4 files for iPods and Apple TV. This package consists of a hardware unit called Dazzle and a software application called Pinnacle Video Capture (PVC). Dazzle is a curvy triangle-shaped box with a silver plastic shell sturdy enough to withstand user klutziness (Figure 1). It weighs in at ~5.8 ounces (including an integrated USB cable) and measures about 3.75 x 5.5. x 1 inches. The unitʼs front panel has four jacks—two color-coded stereo audio, one color-coded composite RCA video, and one S-video—plus an on/off indicator light, while its apex supports the aforementioned USB cable which is 70 ample inches long. On the inside is the encoding circuitry that frees up your Macʼs CPU to take care of other business.
Figure 1. Dazzle (left) and Pinnacle Video Capture (right) work together as a ridiculously easy and affordable analog-to-digital converter.
Dazzle is the poster child of plug-and-play. It is so easy to use that you can forget about the single-sheet Quick Start Guide with instructions in English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish. Any family member, regardless of experience, can readily become an expert. Simply connect an analog digital source (e.g., camcorder or VCR) to the Dazzle using audio and video cables which you supply, plug Dazzleʼs USB cable into your Macʼs port, launch PVC, and youʼre good to go. PVC is a universal application; i.e., it runs natively on PowerPC and Intel-based Macs. Its single-window user interface is so simple that it could be described as either phenomenally elegant or extremely austere, depending upon your expectations for features and/or customizability. The interface displays five successive panels with a user-friendly, but limited, set of controls. The controls include a text-input box where you type the name of the video
youʼre digitizing (Figure 1), a popup menu for a timer mechanism to set the videoʼs approximate duration (this controls how long PVC will digitize and then automatically stop), a pair of radio buttons for specifying the type of video input—composite or Svideo—connected to Dazzle (Figure 2a), an audio mute button, an audio volume level indicator (Figure 2b), a checkbox to enable the automatic stop feature configured in the first panel, a toggle button to manually stop and restart the digitizing process (Figure 2c), a Back button, and a default Continue button. The final panel indicates that PVC is transferring to iTunes and includes Again and Quit buttons (Figure 2d).
Figure 2. PVCʼs single-window interface presents successive panels for specifying the type of video input (2a), displaying the audioʼs volume level (2b), enabling a timer to automatically stop the digitizing process (2c), and repeating the process or quitting (2d).
Dazzle and PVC, as a team, have mega upside. What I like most is that their exceptional user-friendliness at an affordable price ($99) has the potential to be a huge time saver for home users wanting to digitize a collection of analog video. Thanks to Dazzleʼs hardware encoder and PVCʼs built-in timer mechanism, the user can efficiently launch a digitizing session and then simultaneously employ the Mac for other tasks or walk away while PVC runs to completion unattended. Alas, PVCʼs source of strength—simplicity—also is a source of weakness. This program has zero preference settings and customization options. It encodes only to MPEG-4 at 640x480 resolution (which is fine for an iPod but could look scruffy on a high definition home entertainment system) and creates its output files only in iTunesʼ library. If you want a different file format, resolution, and/or destination folder for Dazzleʼs digital output, youʼre out of luck. I have several additional quibbles with PVC. 1) Most importantly, version 1.0 is known to be incompatible with Mac OS X Leopard—the symptom is a failure to recognize audio input; thus, PVC users running Leopard should head immediately to Pinnacleʼs website and download version 1.0.1 (which is Leopard compatible) instead of installing version 1.0 from the CD included in the package. 2) PVCʼs last panel (Figure 2d) would benefit greatly from the addition of a progress indicator or some other sort of visual feedback to show when the transfer to iTunes has finished. 3) For each file that PVC generates in iTunes, it also generates a temp file of equal disk-eating size; if PVC quits without properly deleting these files, they end up in a “Recovered files” folder in the trash. reviewed by Barry Fass-Holmes
