ADS Technologies, a company that makes consumer video editing solutions, announced a new real-time DVD video capture device, USB Instant DVD for Macs, at this week’s Macworld Conference & Expo in New York City. It brings DVD creation to older Power Mac G3s and G4s.
Users of such machines can now record their home movies in full resolution DVD-quality video, then author on DVD or CD recordable discs to share with family and friends, according to Mike McCoy, ADS Technologies president. The USB device will be available in October for about US$449. With it, even inexperienced users can transfer videos from any analog or S-VHS source such as VHS tapes, camcorders or DVD players to their Mac, McCoy said.
USB Instant DVD for Macs utilizes hardware-based MPEG-2 compression (the same format used in DVD movies) for video at full 720 X 480 NTSC (720 X 576 PAL) resolution and stereo sound. Because the MPEG-2 encoding is done on the fly, render time is eliminated and the process can be done in a relatively short amount of time, McCoy said. The captured video can be trimmed, authored and burned to a CD or DVD recordable disk with bundled software from Pixela. The software bundle also includes a plug-in for DVD Studio Pro.
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