Product Reviews

Apple's iMovie is a great idea. At last, there's an easy way to edit hours' worth of video camera footage of weddings and birthdays and create something at least vaguely watchable.

But after you've lovingly crafted your iMovie, you have a problem. How do you show it off? At the moment, you're effectively limited to running it as a QuickTime movie in full-screen mode on your Mac.

Perhaps you want to upload it to your Web homepage, like Steve Jobs suggests during his keynotes. But one five-minute QuickTime movie can easily take up 1Gb of file space if you want to post anything other than a small, jerky postage stamp to play back. So even with the availability of broadband, users are still going to be posting VHS cassettes of the Christmas Day festivities to the grandparents for some time to come.

There are no analog video-out ports on any iMacs or Power Mac G4s. Apple, rather conveniently, forgot to mention that you can't output your movies on any other medium. Unless, that is, you've splashed out several grand on the sole SuperDrive-equipped Power Mac G4, or have a DV camera with the DV-in capability switched on.

If nothing else, the Formac Studio box is a simple solution to this problem and, for some people, it could be worth its price for this function alone. Use the six-pin FireWire cable supplied to link your Mac to the Studio box, which has analog composite (RCA connectors) and S-Video outputs to your VHS VCR. Open iMovie, play your movie and you can record it straight to VHS tape on your video. It's that easy.

The Formac Studio can also accept analog input (composite and S-Video) from standard VHS and Hi-8 VCRs and camcorders, which it automatically converts to the DV format footage native to iMovie, Final Cut Pro and Adobe's Premiere. So now you don't need to buy a DV camcorder to join the iMovie revolution. And you can combine archive footage with your DV camcorder footage in a single movie.

Bridging the gap

The Formac Studio is designed to work seamlessly with the above-mentioned DV editing programs and, in a nice touch, it can even draw its power from your Mac via the FireWire cable, doing away with the need for a mains connection. Generally, the Studio will behave as if it was a DV camera hooked up to the Mac, but with some subtle differences that initially take a little getting used to.

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you're familiar with iMovie, you'll appreciate the slick way that the on-screen transport controls enable you to rewind, forward, play and record remotely from your DV camera.

This isn't the case with the Formac Studio because it's only a bridge to a non-FireWire camera, so you have to stop and start your VHS/Hi-8 camera/VCR manually. However, no signal will appear in iMovie unless you press the play button, which is effectively an on/off video feed switch. This was not explained anywhere in the Studio's poor manual.

Another phenomenon, which neither Formac nor Apple have seen fit to mention, is QuickTime's dire representation of moving video. We imported some reasonable-quality Hi-8 footage into iMovie and were horrified by the poor resolution, dropped frames, blocky artefacts and jerky playback. (This was on a 400MHz iMac DV SE running iMovie 2 and QuickTime 4.1, a better platform than many users of iMovie will have.)

All too easily, you could conclude that the Studio's onboard analog-to-digital converter was very poor. However, using the Studio to output this same iMovie to a VHS VCR revealed that the final quality (after an analog-to-digital and then back to analog conversion) was nearly as good as the original output from the Hi-8 camera. It was certainly as good as a typical first-generation Hi-8 to VHS copy, which is testament to the Studio's excellent hardware. Formac claims a maximum display and capture of full-size 720 x 480 DV video at 30 frames per second.

Tune in, turn on

Another use for the Formac Studio is as an output to your TV, so it can monitor what you really are going to end up with rather than relying on your Mac screen during an iMovie session.

The Formac Studio's main weakness is the fact that it's bundled with ProTV 2.6, a software program which was originally designed to control Formac's TV tuner on a PCI card.

Misleadingly, the first half of the Formac Studio's documentation concentrates on using it as a TV tuner: you can plug a standard TV aerial or cable feed into the TV antenna input. Studio made a very poor TV, its performance was glitchy, the channels were hard to tune and the sound often disappeared.

Formac's suggestion that you could use the Studio and your Mac as a hard disk-based VCR should be put out of your mind quickly. Whoever wrote the manual (PDF file on CD-only) needs to get real.

It took some time to get through the bad experience of using the Studio with ProTV and realise the product's main strengths, which are as a bridge to the world of analog video. The Studio is at its best when you ignore the manual and keep it away from Formac's software.

Despite Studio's shortcomings, as long as DV video remains a minority medium, and QuickTime's display of video footage remains so dire, the Studio is a really useful product for any Mac-owning home video enthusiast.

NEEDS: Mac OS 9, QuickTime 4, FireWire connector