Software and Hardware Reviews

DVDXpressDX2 Review

by Louis Vitale

If you were at the last Club meeting, you know I had my eye on this great little piece of hardware. I have wanted to convert many old VCR tapes to DVD, but never got around to it. Now is the time and DVDXpress makes it easy.

The DVDXpress is a small device that takes your raw video and sound analog output and converts it on the fly to a digital signal your computer can understand. There are many such devices on the market, but this one is much more capable than most. It supports all of the most popular video formats including MPEG4 and DivX video. Its advanced chipset does all the work, not your computer. It uses hardware compression, so you get better quality video and smaller file size. A big plus!

Connecting it to your computer is covered by one line in the manual. Plug in your VCR or camcorder using either RCA jacks or an S Video cable and connect it to your computer with a USB cable. That's it, and all the software needed including drivers are on a single CD. Any video source will do, even my old 10lb shoulder mounted camcorder worked just fine.

There are two basic pieces of software. CapWiz 3.8, is the capture software. This provides an interface for you to capture the data off your VCR tape or from your Camcorder and create a Digital file on your hard drive. You can do some basic editing during this process. It allows you to chose which portions of the tape to capture and you can control the brightness and color balance as you go. This leaves you with a much smaller file from which to create your movie.

CapWiz is a full featured capture program. It allows you to directly create video for your video iPod or your Sony PSP. This is where all the action is today. Take some video of your child's first steps and put it on your iPod to show all your hip friends. (Is my age showing?) The best feature is Direct to Disk. This allows you to simply copy a VHS tape to a DVD. All types of Media are supported and basic authoring tool make the process very simple. Here is the answer to preserving those important tapes deteriorating on your shelf.

Included is ULEAD VideoStudio 9 SE. It is a “lite” version of their full featured editing package. It is more than adequate to get you started. Open up the software and import the file you just captured. It probably is a good thing that the software is a simplified version, since there is NO documetion. Editing is covered in one sentence. The on-line help is not much better. The software is very intuitive, however, so after some time spent “playing” it becomes clear.

A great feature is the auto scene creation. The software scans your video file and automatically divides it onto scenes. These scenes are displayed by a series of thumbnails. You can literally pick what scenes you want, place them on a time line, add titles, and you have your basic movie. You can add DVD menus and create chapter selections before burning to a DVD.

The minimum system requirements are pretty steep and the recommended requirements ever higher. I would not use this product without at least a 1.5 Pentium CPU, 512MB of Ram, 20 GB of free disk space on a 7200rpm IED Hard Drive. You will need 1024 x 786 resolution from your video card, USB 2, a CD-Rom for installation and a DVD burner.

Even though my system exceeded most of these requirements I ran into trouble using the Direct to Disk function. I suspect that my 512 of Ram was not really sufficient to process the enormous amount of data that was passing through the system.

www.adstech.com is the product web site. For a registered user there is Tech support available on this site. The current going price on the net is about $90 and an upgrade to the ULead 9 SE to a full version of VideoStudio 10 is about $60.

If you are serious about preserving those old VCR tapes or creating movies with your new camcorder this is the product for you.