Dazzle Hollywood DV-Bridge, any good?

[yeedog]

Hi all I want to take some stuff i have on VHS tapes and trasfer them into MPEG and burn them as VCDs. I have been doing this via a digital camcorder, but I had to record to the DV cam first, before i can get it on to the computer. Thus it took twice as long.

So after some research i found the Dazzle Hollywood DV-Bridge and it seems like its what i want but it's so expensive, $300 which is the same price as Dazzle's Digital Video Creator II.

What i would like to know is what is the diference between them? I read the descriptions on dazzle's site, but i'm still unsure. I'm assuming you get the same thing with each, but with the Dazzle's Digital Video Creator II you get software too. Am i wrong in this? I have all the sofware i need along with firewire ports, i just need some kind of connector to get things from VHS tapes on to my computer.

Does Dazzle's Digital Video Creator II allow real time MPEG compression or any other worthy feature that i would choose that one over the Hollywood DV-Bridge? They are the same price so i'm just all confused about the differances.

If somebody can explain this to me that would be great!

Thanks!

 

[SilentRunning]

I have been considering getting the Digital Video Creator II myself.

The Digital Video Creator II comes with a external box similar to the Hollywood DV Bridge. However this is only able to capture to the computer. Also include in the package is a pci card which has a hardware mpeg/mpeg2 encoder/decoder. The external box plugs into this card.


The Hollywood DV Bridge is an external device that connects to a firewire port (must have a firewire port to computer to capture from it). What this device does is convert DV to Analog and Analog to DV. This will work independant of your computer. You can plug an Analog device and a DV device into this and transfer from one format to the other without using your computer.

 

[yeedog]

icic, thanks for the reply.

So with the Digital Video Creator II i would be able to do real time conversions from VHS tapes directly to MPEG, correct? Right now with the DV cam method i'm using I have to bring it into my computer, via fire wirem in DV format and then change it to MPEG.

If i can do real time MPEG conversions will my current software, Vegas Video 3.0, be able to recongize this or will I have to use some other kind of video editing program? I'm already confortable with Vegas Video so it would be great if i could use it with real time encoding.

Thanks!