Creative Video Blaster Editor

If you're looking for a fast and simple solution for getting your digital home movies ready for burning to DVD, the Creative Video Blaster Editor just might be the ticket. A slender silver box with a gaggle of ports on its front and rear panels, the Creative Video Blaster Editor eliminates the hassle of trying to find the right connection to transfer your analog and digital videos to your notebook. At the same time, the device shares the burden with your laptop of rendering your digital video files to MPEG-2, so making movies DVD-compatible is a breeze.
 
Setting the device up with our notebook was a cinch. Just load the included installation software on your system, connect the Video Blaster Editor with the included USB cable, and plug in the device. We plugged the included DV four-pin FireWire cable into our Canon Optura 500 miniDV camcorder, connected it to the Video Blaster Editor, and were ready to go. On the downside, S-Video and A/V cables aren't included.
 
Because this device harnesses the power of both the Video Blaster Editor's CPU and the CPU in your laptop (a process Creative calls "Turbo Rendering"), converting DV files to MPEG-2 files was a quick process. On our tests, we rendered about ten minutes of footage in just over six minutes, which is about half the time it would take using software alone. The compressed nature of the MPEG-2 files will save space on your hard drive.
 
While the Creative Video Blaster Editor is ideal for older laptops that might not have FireWire or S-Video ports, the minimum system requirements are a bit steep and somewhat limit the device's appeal. (In addition to a DVD burner, you'll need at least 20GB of hard drive space for video editing.) Nevertheless, if you have lots of digital video you want to burn to DVD, the Creative Video Blaster Editor should make your life easier.

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