If you own a camcorder and have ever thought that you would like to turn your amateur footage into a professional-style DVD with special effects, then consider the DVD Creation Station 200 (DCS 200) from Dazzle.

A combination of hardware and software, it enables you to connect your camcorder or VCR to your PC and edit your film clips with ease.

The basis of the package is the DCS 200 unit. This is a sleek black box that you connect your camcorder to, which in turn connects to your PC using a USB connection.

It isn't very big and can be laid flat or stood on its end using a supplied stand. On its back are all the ports that you need in order to connect to most camcorders.

It has twin phono ports for stereo sound, a composite video port and an S-Video port. More importantly, it comes with a variety of cables to ensure hooking up is not a problem.

Once you've got your camcorder connected, getting the footage across is very simple. In order to do this, you need to use the supplied MovieStar 5 software.

When the software is first launched, three options are presented: capture; edit or produce. To capture, you first need to select the DCS 200 as your input device.

So that you know how many clips you can fit on the PC's hard disk, the software tells you how much space you have on your PC in terms of hours and minutes.

This is very useful as video clips do take up quite a bit of space. Once you've decided that there is sufficient space, just press play on the camcorder and click on the record button on screen.

Having saved the footage, you can then edit it. This again is very simple.

To get started, all you have to do is drag and drop your captured footage file to the timeline at the bottom of the screen.

With the main footage in place, you can then use the software's tools to cut or zoom into any section, take snapshots of any frame and delete parts if you don't want them.

You can create titles by selecting the titles box and then typing in whatever you want. These can then be dropped into your timeline.

As well as titles, you can put special transition effects in. With these you can set the way each section flows into the next with more than 50 different ones to choose from.

When you've made all the edits that you want, you can then transfer your project to a CD, DVD, the internet or back onto videotape as you prefer.

The format it is saved in can be changed according to what suits. Lower quality footage is ideal for recording on CD-R while better quality formats should be chosen for DVD.

If you have a recordable DVD drive and want to make a more professional copy, Dazzle also provides a copy of DVD Complete Package. This can be used to create Hollywood-style DVDs.

Features of this include creating chapters, root menus and special features as with commercial DVDs.

One nice feature that makes the DCS 200 different from the majority of analogue capture devices is the inclusion of digital camera memory card slots.

If you use Compact Flash, Memory Stick, SD, MMC or SmartMedia memory in your camera, the DCS 200 supports direct downloading from the memory card to the PC.

The DCS 200 10 is straightforward and easy-to-use.

If you have a large quantity of camcorder footage you would like to store in a digital format or simply edit into better films, the Dazzle DVD Creation Station 200 could be a good investment.

It may be too expensive for the casual user though.

DETAILS
Contact: Dazzle 0118 932 1613

www.dazzle.com