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July 04, 2004
HP Movie Writer dc3000
A straightforward way to record your old VHS cassettes and camcorder footage on DVD.
With the advent of affordable recordable DVD drives and straightforward video-editing software, creating your own movies and putting them on disc is now a real possibility. In theory, anyone with a camcorder can record a family holiday, edit it to make things look interesting and then record their masterpiece on disc. In reality, things are always a little more complicated but HP has just changed all that with the Movie Writer dc3000.
Combining video capture and DVD burning in an external USB 2 drive, the Movie Writer eliminates unnecessary complications. Whether you want to transfer and edit your camcorder footage or just get those old VHS tapes onto a shiny disc before they finally expire, everything has been made as simple as possible.
The recordable DVD drive is housed in a plastic case, with phono inputs for composite video, S-Video and audio on the side. These can be used to connect an analogue camcorder or VCR. If you've got a digital camcorder, you can use FireWire connection if your PC has one. It's a real shame FireWire wasn't included on the drive, though no doubt this would have complicated the design.
The Movie Writer offers DVD+R recording at four-speed and DVD+RW media at 2.4-speed. To get you going, HP includes one disc of each type in the box and the accompanying software advises the most appropriate media to use based on the project at hand, which we think is an excellent idea. The drive reads standard DVDs at eight-speed and can also write to CD-Rs.
HP provides several ways to transfer your material to disc, mainly depending on what it is you want to do with it. The simplest method is to attach your camcorder leads and then hit the Record button on the drive. Doing this launches a software wizard that takes you, step by step, through the whole recording processes, right down to designing a title menu and box cover. After getting several people to burn their own discs, we have to say we were extremely impressed at just how easy this process is. However, this method doesn't actually allow you to edit your footage and we couldn't use it with the FireWire port on our PC.
Other software is supplied for more complicated work but again, HP has focused on keeping things as simple as possible. ArcSoft's excellent ShowBiz allows you to capture, rearrange and generally polish your video, while an application called AutoProducer can automatically apply various editing styles to your video, such as an 'over-the-top music video', then synchronise the images in time to an MP3 soundtrack. Given that the whole thing takes just minutes, the results are truly impressive.
HP also supplies software to back up important data on DVD, along with Cyberlink's PowerDVD to watch your own and other pre-recorded movies.
Aside from the lack of a FireWire input, the only problem we have with the Movie Writer is the price. At £279, the drive is a little on the expensive side, especially compared with the latest internal units that can read and write to all formats of recordable disc. However, the capturing and software facilities really do make everything straightforward and this simply cannot be ignored. If you're looking for a way to put old recordings on a shiny new DVD disc, we really can't think of an easier way.
Contact: HP 0870 547 4747
www.hp.com/uk
Posted by robeva at July 4, 2004 04:07 PM
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