Product Reviews

More demand is being placed on professional video makers to provide DVD copies of commissioned work. To keep work turning over quickly, many professionals and consumers in the wedding and corporate sector will eventually ditch their software MPEG encoders in favour of faster hardware solutions.

Vitec's DVD Cut Machine Plus (DCM+) is a seemingly comprehensive suite of hardware and software for MPEG encoding and DVD authoring, coming in at a relatively inexpensive £598. The bundle contains two cards - an analog capture board and a plain OHCI IEEE-1394 card - alongside a host of small software applications carrying the Vitec brand and a copy of Roxio's VideoPack 5.1.

The analog board sports S-Video inputs and outputs, as well as 3.5mm jacks for audio. There's also a couple of S-Video-to-RCA adaptors, allowing composite video cables to be connected. The capture program offers preset templates for VCD, SVCD and DVD-compliant MPEG, as well as good levels of customisation. Video can be captured as multiplexed program streams or elemental streams, with audio encoded in MPEG, PCM or AC-3 format. Encoding bit rates can be set manually, and users can also choose between constant and variable bit-rate encoding. More subjective controls are on offer too, such as the ability to alter colour saturation, brightness, contrast and audio levels.

In our tests, the best results were from constant bit-rate encoding. However, while captures from well-lit video shot using a tripod looked great in DVD-compliant files, handheld concert footage under wild lighting looked rather grainy compared with the original.

Video can also be captured directly via IEEE-1394, using another supplied program called DVRobot. As a software encoder, MPEG isn't created in real-time, but it cleverly paused and resumed playback of the connected DV deck whenever its buffer became full. Encoding options aren't as rich as with analog capture - there's no VBR option and no way of making elementary streams with PCM or AC-3 audio.

A third encoding method is provided in the form of MPEG Maker 2 - a simple software encoder,

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allowing CBR and VBR encoding for DVD and VCD. Annoyingly, though, it won't encode from Type-1 DV files captured via the IEEE-1394 card with Adobe Premiere or Ulead VideoStudio. Type-2 files brought in with Pinnacle's Studio 7 worked fine, though. Quality of encoding from both software applications was good, but not the best I've seen.

Other MPEG tools in the bundle include VIDEO Clip MPEG-2 - a simple trimming and editing program, allowing unwanted tops and tails to be cut from captured MPEGs and also providing a means for files to be joined together as long sequences. Another program, VOBtoMPEG, splits DVD VOB files into their component video and audio elements, while DVD Maker creates simple disk images from video and audio files. However, these must be burned to DVD with another program such as VOB Instant CD/DVD (not supplied).

Last in the impressive DCM+ software armoury is Roxio's VideoPack 5.1. The latest update sees some genuine improvements over VideoPack 5 (see Reviews, issue 87, p197). For a start, the program now runs properly under Windows XP and supports DVD+RW drives. Creation of chapter points has been simplified, although there's still no real-time video playback when setting such markers. Also, users have the ability to switch between VCD, SVCD and DVD standards at any stage of the authoring process. As before, menus can be static or animated, and full control is provided over the structure and sequence of video and slide show elements within the project.

It's not a professional tool, however, as there's no DLT output and no support for additional video angles, audio tracks or subtitle streams. The program is still awkward to use and ultimately quite limited considering its market positioning. Ulead's DVD Workshop would have been a more sensible choice, as it does much the same as VideoPack, but has a far friendlier interface and excellent menu design tools.

In all, DCM+ provides an excellent suite of tools for the price, the most important of which being analog capture to MPEG formats. Support for AC-3 audio in elemental streams is excellent - and rare at this price level - and while capture quality was good, it wasn't as clean as we'd like. The bundle's DV and software-only encoding solutions are welcome, and the range of small MPEG-handling applications is comprehensive and well thought out. My only gripe is with the choice of VideoPack 5.1 for DVD authoring - it's still a poorly designed program and far from being the only choice for OEM deals at this level.

Overall, DCM+ works well, but might not give the best value or performance. Before buying, I suggest looking at Canopus' MVR1000 or Pinnacle's older and slightly pricier DC1000.