Dazzle Hollywood DVBridge Analog-Digital Video Converter Review

by Tim Liebe

Score (DVBridge Hardware):

Features: 7

Look and Feel: 8

Performance: 8

Usability: 7

Value: 8

Editor’s Rating: 7¾ 

 

Score (MainActor Software):
Features: 6
Look and Feel: 4
Performance: 5
Usability: 3
Value: 4
Editor’s Rating: 4½

While most current MiniDV and Digital 8 camcorders have analog-to-digital recording capability so you can edit your old analog tapes on your FireWire (IEEE-1394)-equipped computer, very few older digital camcorders do. Even if your camcorder has analog A/V in, you still have to dub the analog tapes to digital before you can capture digital video to your hard drive. This is not only inconvenient, it also causes you to lose a generation in the dubbing process. 

Dazzle’s Hollywood DVBridge (SRP $299) circumvents this problem via an external box with 6-pin to 6-pin FireWire cable which converts analog A/V to digital, digital to analog, or pass-through digital to digital. It’s designed to work as both a converter and nonlinear editor for your FireWire-port Windows 98SE/ME/2000 PC or OS 9.0.4-plus Mac. To that end, the Windows version comes with a software bundle featuring MainConcept MainActor 3.5, a German-designed capture/editing/output software, as well as a full version of MGI VideoWave 4.

DVBridge can also be used as a standalone converter like Sony’s $499 DVMC-DA2, dubbing to either a second MiniDV deck or your current IEEE-1394 capture card and software. It does a good job duplicating what the DVMC-DA2 does for about half the cost. It converts analog video to digital, and vice versa, easily and intuitively. You just hook your dubbing cables up with DVBridge between the playback and record deck, push a button on the back of the DVBridge box to select your conversion option, hit Play and Record, and dub. 

However, as a nonlinear capture and editing application for your Windows PC, DVBridge’s MainActor software falls down badly - hence the split between the high hardware rating and the low software one. The System Requirements for Windows are a Pentium II 400 MHz PC with 64 MB of RAM, and you’ll need at least that if you want it to run right. We tried it out on a Pentium Celeron 400 MHz PC with 128 MB of RAM, and while it ran, sort of, it was real slow and prone to frame drops and system freezes. 

The product as shipped doesn’t come with an IEEE-1394 board, as Dazzle assumes you’ve already got one in your PC. This wouldn’t be that big a problem seeing as FireWire cards sell for under $100, except that MainActor won’t always play well with your FireWire card. 

In the course of this review, we installed DVBridge and MainActor on PCs with Pinnacle Systems’ consumer StudioDV and pro-level DV500, ADS Technologies’ Pyro and AVerMedia’s AVerDV cards. Over the course of three frustrating days and several phone calls to Dazzle Tech Support, we discovered that something in the various hardware/software combinations would always, at some point, delete or corrupt Microsoft’s DV Camera and VCR driver which the MainActor software needs to capture video. We had to reinstall MainActor several times on each computer, and swap out FireWire cards at least once per computer. We also discovered that neither the twenty-page User’s Guide, MainActor’s Help files nor Dazzle’s Website had any troubleshooting information. 

As problematic as the lack of troubleshooting information was, that was nothing compared to the fun&games we had trying to use MainActor once we had all the hardware and software working properly. MainActor consists of five sub-applications - DV-Capture, VideoCapture, DV-Out, VideoEditor and Sequencer. According to both the User’s Guide and the Help files, VideoCapture is to be used for analog-digital A/V conversion, while DV-Capture is to be used for digital-analog conversion. However, we found out that we had much better luck capturing analog files with DV-Capture, even though it doesn’t come with captured frame or dropped frame counters.

VideoEditor converts your captured video into a frame-by-frame list for (according to the Help file) “animation composing and processing”, while Sequencer is a timeline-based NLE software similar in features to Ulead MediaStudio Pro. However, Sequencer doesn’t have a Trim Clip window - you have to either split the clip then delete the portion you don’t want, or “push” the unwanted portion off the timeline like you would with the “MovieStar” editing software bundled with Dazzle’s DVC II. 

 After several days of trying to use MainActor, we gave up and used either the bundled copy of VideoWave, Ulead’s Video Studio 4.0 or Adobe Premiere for the DV500 to capture and edit instead. In all cases, DVBridge worked a lot better with the third-party software than it did with the included MainActor. 

If you intend to simply use DVBridge for conversion to tape or to your current NLE application, it works great and costs a lot less than Sony’s comparable DVMC-DA2. If you intend to use DVBridge with MainActor 3.5 as a total nonlinear editing solution, though, it’ll drive you nuts. Unless Dazzle intends to radically rewrite MainActor so it’ll work as seamlessly with its own hardware as everybody else’s software does, they should simply OEM all their software.