TERRATEC CAMEO 400 AV MOBILE

With the cost of camcorders coming down and video editing on the PC becoming so readily available, Terratec has decided to offer mobile users the chance of editing their home movies with the Cameo 400 AV mobile unit (£255 inc.VAT). However, this isn’t for the casual user, as reflected in the price, but is instead aimed at the serious amateur or hobbyist. The crux of the device is a Type II PC Card that you can put into a spare PC Card slot on your laptop. You can then connect it to anything from a DVD player, games console or camcorder to record from. Devices can be attached either via the three phono sockets or an S-Video Port.

Terractec has also included a SCART adapter for easy connection to most home entertainment devices. Footage is then captured, converted into the MPEG-2/1 format and saved onto your hard drive. The unit couldn’t be any simpler and within minutes we had connected an Xbox and recorded our first sample images – some gaming action to show a friend how to get past a tricky level in a game they were stuck on. Additionally, the capture card can be set up to grab stills shots from any feed and, like the video footage, this was incredibly easy to do.

However, it’s all very well capturing the feed, but then what? While the package allows you to use other software you are perhaps more familiar with, the Cameo 400 also comes with an editing and DVD burning solution in the box to get you started: Ulead’s VideoStudio 7SE DVD and DVD MovieFactory 2 SE. Both are sufficiently capable of the task in hand allowing you to edit files, add overlays, special effects and titles as well as audio tracks to produce your film masterpiece. The software also gives you an output; either to be emailed to friends and family as an AVI file or burnt onto a VCD or DVD to be played in virtually any DVD player. Although the software is fairly basic and aimed at those starting out, it’s ample enough to produce results quickly. Bringing video capture capabilities to the laptop allows you to have the freedom to edit and capture on the fly. T

he only problem however is that recording vast amounts of footage and then editing it does require vast amounts of hard drive space, memory and processing power, which is something that most laptops don’t have an infinite amount of. That said, any device that allows you to do what would normally be done on a desktop without all the external boxes and power adapters has got to be great thinking.

FACTS £174/£255 (EX/INC. VAT)
CONTACT: HTTP://EN.TERRATEC.NET