PRODUCT: Belkin USB VideoBus II

MANUFACTURER: Beklin

REVIEWED BY: Rose Miller

PRODUCT REVIEW:

The Belkin VideoBus II is a must have for anyone with a camcorder or vcr. It’s a great way to create movie, video clips or still pictures to share with friends and family. You can email pictures or video clips to family or post them on web sites. It let’s you videoconference with people, which is a great feature to have if you have family living far away. It’s also a great feature for business owners who need to keep in contact while away.

Editing your very own movies is fun and fairly easy, even to a novice, with the included software, MGI's VideoWave™ III SE. Use MGI's PhotoSuite III SE to create a photo album, calendars and posters and edit photos. It does help to have some experience though. There are great tutorials included if you get stuck. The VideoBus II is compatible with Windows Millennium, which is a plus because not much is, so you can use the Movie Maker program to transfer video from an analog camera or VCR to your PC. You’ll be able to capture, edit and make videos on your computer at resolutions up to 352 x 288dpi and 30 frames per second.

Connecting the VideoBus and your video source to your computer is fairly uncomplicated. Use the S-Video connector or the audio and video connectors you attach your camera to the TV or vcr with normally. Connectors are included with the hardware. The VideoBus is connected to the computer via USB, which is a feature I really love. I use a hub so I don’t have to crawl around and find the USB connector in the back of the computer. Some USB devices don’t work well through a hub, but the VideoBus works perfectly!! The only thing that I needed were a few files from my Windows ME CD that were not included in the install software, and I was set to go.

I have been having a great deal of fun making mini movies and playing with the different effects and editing tools. It is a lot easier to edit clips this way than copying the tape directly to the vcr. You really should have a pretty fast processor and quite a bit of memory. The recommended is 350MHz, 128MB RAM and 1GB or greater free space for video capture. I recommend a little higher for processor speed and free disk space. I have a 1Gig processor with 128 MB RAM and 20+ free disk space. The whole capture process ran very smooth and quickly for me. I was very pleased.

I recommend buying the Belkin VideoBus to anyone that uses a camcorder. It’s truly a great way to make you movies and share them. Also, it’s a lot easier and cheaper to mail a cd than it is a vcr tape.

REVIEWER INFORMATION: Rose Miller lives in Maine with her husband and two children. She works as a TV ad scanner. She enjoys reading, crafts and creating webpages and graphics.