14 DAY TRIAL // Fortunately, the VHS era has come to an end, and despite the fact that I was never crazy about movies, I must admit I respect the passion of those people that kept using VHS players and tapes regardless of the high costs implied by this until less than a decade ago. Just when I think about having the tape with your favorite movie damaged by a VHS player, it makes me remember about my audio tapes that were damaged by various "Made in China" cassette players... but enough of this! Now we're living in a digital age, and storing multimedia information reliably is no longer a dream, although nothing is perfect...
The ability to capture video to your hard drive using specialized software on today's computers is praised by a lot of people, and I can't do anything else than agree with this, because there's a long road from tape recording with all its inconvenients and simply pushing a mouse button.
Red Lightning Software is a producer that released DV Monitor Pro, a software application that is capable of capturing live video straight to your hard drive. To help you better organize your clips, this program gives you the chance to add labels, ratings and comments to each of them, so you won't have to look for "that movie" ever again!
The Clip Manager tool allows you to manage your video clips just like you would do it with your music in iTunes, while the thickness of the Guides can be adjusted between 1 and 5 pixels to make them easier to see. Additional settings allow you to set a free space limit in order to prevent running out of hard drive space, as well as choosing to de-interlace the main video window to improve the image quality.
DV Monitor Pro is available for 199$, and requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later, a PowerPC G4 1.2GHz and up or an Intel Mac, and a DV camera with Firewire (IEEE 1394), while a Core Image Enabled Mac is good to have for full performance. As usual, a demo version of this program can be downloaded from our site, here, so take your time to try it out!