Dazzle Hollywood DV-Bridge
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I must admit that I was absolutely blown away by the results obtained from the DV-Bridge. I have previously used a Sony DSR-PD150 DVCam camcorder to convert between analog and DV when capturing on the G4 in Final Cut Pro and I wasn't very happy with the results. The PD150 conversion lost a considerable amount of luminance, resulting in images that were much darker than the originals. I had to compensate for the level difference by boosting the video using a proc-amp during the capture process. By the way, I have tried two different PD150s and both gave similar results.
When I did the capture through the DV-Bridge, the levels were right on. Looking at the color bars on the Final Cut Pro waveform monitor and vectorscope showed that the video signals suffered no alteration during the digitizing process. That is the way it should be and Dazzle deserves praise for preserving the signal accuracy, specially in a consumer-priced product. The next thing that I was anxious to find out was whether the conversion would introduce any objectionable artifacts. Playing back the captured footage on a broadcast reference monitor was another pleasant surprise. The video looked virtually identical to the original and, even in difficult to compress shots such as rippled ocean water, there were no visible artifacts. I have seen those a few times before on footage shot with a Sony VX-1000 DV camcorder and not seeing them on the MII captured footage was very nice. Because the video signal had been so wonderfully preserved during the digitizing process, the DV-converted footage looked absolutely great. In fact, it compared very well to the footage captured with the $10,000 card but with all the added advantages of the DV format in terms of interchangeability, storage requirements and overall usability. While other codecs may impose certain limitations, on the Mac DV can be used by any application seamlessly and it plays back at full resolution in real time on the computer screen.
Because the quality of the DV-Bridge-captured footage was so good, I tried to do something that is considered taboo in the DV world: blue screen chroma keying. Due to the format's 4:1:1 chroma processing and slight compression artifacts, DV is not considered to be the ideal format for blue chroma keying. While I could see some problems with the captured blue background on the computer screen, the same footage viewed on the video monitor didn't show these problems. So I chose some other footage for the background and used the normal chroma keying tools available in FCP. To my surprise, after a little tweaking I obtained results that were as good as those I obtained by capturing with lossless compression on a component video system. The subject I used originally was a female actor, and the key was so good that I could preserve individual hair strands. Needless to say, that is way better than I had expected. Unfortunately I could not post the results here because I don't have that actor's permission to do so.
The Hollywood DV-Bridge is a PC- and Mac-compatible stand-alone device that has S-Video (Y/C) and composite video inputs and outputs, as well as stereo audio ins and outs through RCA connectors. It also has two 6-pin 1394 connectors (which can function as a FireWire passthrough), as well as in and out connections. It comes with one 6-pin to 6-pin 1394 cable to get you going right out of the box but you must supply the more common analog cables. The Hollywood DV-Bridge also has a LANC connector in the back, which supposedly translates DV camera control codes into LANC so that your editing application can control LANC-compatible devices. Since I don't own any such device, I didn't test this capability.
Analog audio is sampled at 48 KHz at 16 bits. DV audio can be output in analog at 32 KHz at 12 bits, 44.1 KHz at 16 bits or 48 KHz at 16 bits
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