Terratec's Cameo 400 AV mobile is an easy-to-use solution for those looking for a quick and easy way to input and edit videos from analogue and digital sources on their laptop. The package consists of a Type II PC Card that has various A/V-in ports for connecting devices - such as a DVD player, DV camcorder or satellite receiver - and three software titles for managing and editing video on your laptop. Once a video source is connected to your laptop, the Cameo 400 AV mobile then converts video signals into MPEG 1/2 format, with little CPU loads on your laptop. It's certainly easy to use, but you'll likely outgrow the supplied software relatively quickly as your video needs increase.

Pros: S-Video and component video ports; includes hardware decoder
Cons: No Dolby Digital encoding; plug-in problems; relatively expensive


The Cameo 400 AV mobile is essentially just a Type II PC Card that offers composite, S-Video and stereo-in connectors for recording and editing video on your laptop. Unfortunately, there's no digital audio-in support or the ability to import Dolby Digital AC-3 stereo audio.

The PC Card also doubles as a hardware MPEG 1/2 encoder, which helps to minimise CPU overload on your laptop when you're converting video to MPEG format. It's thanks to this MPEG encoder that the solution can run on systems with a 800MHz processor and just 128MB of RAM. However, it's worth noting that the Cameo 400 AV mobile struggled on our test laptop, a Windows XP Professional-based Toshiba Portégé 4010 with a 933MHz Pentium III processor and 256MB of RAM.

As well as the PC Card, the Cameo 400 AV mobile is bundled with an S-Video cable, composite video and audio cables, plus a Scart adapter that converts video output connections to S-Video and composite. You also get three entry-level software titles, which is good news if you don't currently have a PC-based video-editing application. The titles consist of Terratec's Cameo 400 AV mobile recording and playback application, Ulead System's VideoStudio 7 SE DVD and DVD MovieFactory 2 SE. Terratec also supplies a plug-in, which is required to input video using either of the three applications or another supported video-editing program.

The Cameo 400 AV mobile application is a very basic utility that can be used to record and playback MPEG video in a variety of formats and resolutions, whereas Ulead Systems' VideoStudio 7 SE and MovieFactory 2 SE are slightly more powerful tools for recording and editing DVDs. The utility lets you preview 'live' video before recording and also lets you make alterations to video, including brightness, contrast, hue, saturation and sharpness. The software can also be used to capture Bitmap or JPEG (with quality settings) images from videos.

VideoStudio 7 SE is more powerful and lets you edit, trim and organise your videos in real time using either Story or Timeline modes. You can also add effects, overlays, titles, cross-fades and filters. However, you'll soon outgrow the software because it doesn't offer an audio mixer, the ability to import MP3, WAV or CD-Audio tracks, or output video in 16:9 format. You can't create surround sound audio either, or add special effects that synchronise to the beat and duration of the movie. You can forget about cleaning and restoration tools, too.

Once your video has been edited, you can then burn it to CD or DVD in either VCD, SVCD or DVD format using MovieFactory 2, an intuitive application that lets you burn your work to DVD on-the-fly, complete with text, music and multi-layer DVD menu navigation. However, we did encounter plug-in problems that resulted in the software not recognising the Cameo 400 AV mobile card.

Links:
Cameo 400 AV mobile Web site

BIOS, Jan 28, 04 | Print | Send | Comments (0) | Posted In Video