Dazzle Multimedia DM4000 Digital Video Creator

Rating:
Summary: Simple and easy to use. Put home video on CD or send "Vmail"
Review: Despite the rant from the fellow from Singapore (about the Snazzi - a totally different product) the Dazzle is marvelously easy to use and gives better than average video quality. Read on...
It took me all of 15 minutes to follow the simple directions (including pictures) to hook up the Dazzle and begin capturing video to my hard drive.
The first time around I used the "default" settings and the results were extremely gratifying. Less than an hour after opening the box I was sending off an email to my parents (the proud grandparents) with a video attachment that warmed their hearts. It truly was a snap.
Then I started playing around with the settings and found that I could produce some pretty hi-quality video that I have since used in a CD presentation. The comments I got after the presentation were: "How'd you get that video in their?" and "Tell me where you got that Dazzle!"
Keep in mind that (1) capturing video requires a fairly strong machine (they say a Pentium 133 is minimum, but I'm not sure that would be enough computer) and (2) MPEG video takes up alot of room on your hard drive and takes a long time to send over the internet. (A 7 second clip of video took 4 minutes to download as an email attachment.) But grandma says, "It was worth every second! Send me more!"

Rating:
Summary: Frustrated with snazzi
Review: I bought this product thinking that I would be *finally* able to get some sort of order to my hours of video tapes. What I was looking for in Snazzi was simple. I wanted: 1) Grab a chunk of tape (say 30 min. at a time) 2) Cut out unwanted parts easily & 3) write back on another tape

Unfortunately, as I found out, using Snazzi for above purpose is incredibly (and unnecessarily, IMO) complicated due to bad user interface.

Below are some highlights from my story of frustrating dealings with the product. I and my wife (both of us work in IT) consumed one entired Sunday and came to the conclusion that it is not for us.

I will just list below a couple of experiences.

1) For some reason (!), the audio was not getting grabbed from my camcorder. To compound our misery, we found that the user manual states 'when using camcorder as video input, the audio is off to avoid feedback' or some such mish-mosh. Well, we fiddled around with various wizards and lizards, changing the video sources and audio sources, till at the end we figured out that what we needed as our 'template' was Audio/Video Clip and not a video clip - which was the default set!!! I am sure Dazzle has lots of marketing surveys to support that people usually have just video clips and no audio to go with it. Well, I wanted to make movie of my babie's first babbling and audio was *very* important to me. As I mentioned earlier, the off-hand remark in the manual did not help either.

2) You cannot 'split' a clip easily if you have already split it. e.g. What I want to do is just to grab off 30 minutes of video and then split it 30 ways - 1 minute clip each - and *then* fine tune the clips by hand. There is no way in dazzle where you can do this. You have to split the clips by hand.

3) On the same note as above, you cannot mark more than 1 IN and OUT points on 1 clip. IMO, it would be *much* easier for a user if you could just play the whole 30 minutes which you grabbed and go on marking IN/OUT IN/OUT so that you just keep the parts that you want. You cannot do this in Dazzle Snazzi. You will have to split the 30 minutes *by hand* and mark IN/OUT on each one.

Summary: Not a *easy* product to use. I have given up on it. I have not even tested the quality of video out due to the hassles mentioned above. (The quality appears to be a problem going from images that come up on screen). I am going back to my usual method of play/stop/record start/play/record stop/ff/rew method of editing the tapes.

This product *might* be useful to you if you are looking for 1) Making a clip of exact duration - preferably a very small duration, say 1 minute.

But I guess there are many cheaper products available that will help you do this.

Rating:
Summary: software for parallel port version
Review: i lost my cd software for the dazzle digital video creator parallel port creator dm 4000 how can get the software need help

Rating:
Summary: Bad overall product
Review: Well it's pretty obvious "A proud Dazzle owner" probably works for Dazzle or some affiliated company. Judging by the language alone, you can tell its more of an advertisement than a casual customer review. This is simply a bad product. Dazzle made bad capturing devices in the past, and still does now. This product is buggy, prone to crashes, and arbitrarily (if ever) works.

I'm a network admin and I would consider myself pretty technically competant, and still had one helluva time getting this product to operate properly. Its not that the installation process is troublesome, on the contrary - the installation went fine but still it would work for moments then stop. 75% of the time it would not capture, it would lock up and crash. Within the 25% of the time that it worked - the audio would go mute after a minute, the audio would go out of sync, or it would stop capturing at an random point.

Just to give this product a chance, i tested this on all 3 of my machines at home. The OS of the machines are XP, ME, and 2k. All machines over 2ghz, 512ram, and with 7200rpm ide drives or scsi ultrastar 10k drives. 3 different machines with different video cards and OS's. Same problems with this product on all machines. Its a piece of crap, save your time and the 15% restocking fee.