Citizens of ancient cultures made no multimedia records of their own birthday parties, weddings or babies first steps. How tragic and boring! When they sat down in front of the TV after dinner at family gatherings, what on earth did they watch?
Yet even in the most recorded, videotaped and photographed society in history, we have our own issues. For example, we insist upon upgrading our recording technologies every few years, each time orphaning millions of disks, tapes and cassettes in older formats. All over the world, VHS and camcorder tapes from the 1980s and 1990s are slowly turning to dust.
And it is getting harder to find the equipment you need to play back those videos.
Even the DVD will one day turn out to have been a temporary format, but at least it has advantages over tapes. The video quality is terrific.
You can skip around without rewinding or fast-forwarding. And homemade DVDs may last 100 years, if you believe the vendors of those gold-coated blanks.
Now, the technologically savvy computer nut thinks nothing of connecting an old camcorder or VCR to a well- equipped Mac or PC; hitting "play"; waiting two hours for each tape to transfer in real time; editing and touching up the result on the computer screen; and then waiting another two hours for the resulting video burn onto a DVD.
But in Sony s opinion and many other people s this is much too laborious, expensive and time-consuming. Enter the Sony DVDirect VRD- MC3, a $218 box that converts old and new videotapes into shiny new DVDs with an emphasis on two extremely important attributes: simplicity and reproduction quality.
Under the hood of this cleanly designed, black-and-white plastic case is a DVD burner that accepts almost any format of blank disc: DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD-RW, DVD+RW, and dual-layer, extra-capacity versions of each.
The weird exception: the DVDirect does not accept the dual-layer DVD-RW variety.
The steps to follow, and the experience you will have, depend on what you are copying to and from; this is an extraordinarily versatile machine. In every case, however, the 2.
5-inch, or 6.4 centimeter, color screen provides simple instructions. You operate the whole affair with only four controls: Record, Stop, Return, and a four-arrow navigation button.
Suppose you have a stash of VHS, 8mm, or Hi-8 videotapes. You can connect your old VCR or camcorder to the DVDirect using either an S-video cable for best color or the usual set of three RCA cables, red, white and yellow. Once you hit Play on the VCR, the DVDirect automatically detects which jack you are using.
Then you hit Record.
If you are willing to baby-sit the transfer, you can press Stop on the DVDirect at any time, fast-forward or change the tape, and then hit Record again; doing so creates a new "title" on the DVD s menu, complete with a thumbnail image of the scene. Hitting Pause instead creates a new, invisible "chapter" marker; later, you can use your DVD player s Previous or Next button to skip among these markers during playback.
Alternatively, you can walk away and let the thing roll unattended. The Sony can add chapter markers every 5, 10, 15 or 20 minutes for your convenience.
If you have a more recent camcorder a MiniDV digital model things are even simpler.
You connect the camcorder to the Sony s FireWire jack. The camcorder magically rewinds itself and then pours itself onto a blank DVD. Each scene on the tape automatically becomes a new title on the DVD.
Some of Sony s latest camcorders record onto built-in hard drives. The DVDirect is a natural for these models, since emptying out that hard drive once it is full is a periodic requirement. As a bonus, making such a transfer doesn t require a one-hour, real-time waiting period, since the machine can slurp down the finished computer files right off the camcorder s hard drive.
For your digital camera, the DVDirect has built-in slots for every kind of popular memory card. You can insert a card and, after waiting about 10 seconds a photo, crank out a DVD containing a slide show, complete with background music. You get a choice of four canned, surprisingly not-cheesy- sounding musical soundtracks.
The included compositions loop undetectably and endlessly, so that the music never runs out in mid-slide show.
Alternatively, you can save time by copying the card s photos directly to the DVD. You can even hook up this burner to your PC and use it as a traditional DVD drive for making backups.
A junior version of the popular Nero disc-burning software for Windows comes in the box.
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