Content area
Full Text
As a DVD author, I've come to find there are basically two types of DVD projects. The first is the complex, highly interactive Hollywood-style DVD. For this I spend many days toiling away in DVD Studio Pro, tweaking and testing every last menu and clip. The second type of DVD is when someone walks in with a completed video and wants to dump it to DVD quickly and painlessly. For this purpose, I find DVDSP to be major overkill. Anyone who uses the higher-end authoring programs out there knows it can take hours to author and burn the simplest DVD. Pioneer's PRV-LX1 is squarely aimed to correct this.
The LX1 is a professional broadcast-quality DVD recorder capable of recording from a variety of video input formats. It's perfect for the type of job where the client just wants their video on DVD. There are many users who would greatly benefit from this device-postproduction houses, advertising agencies, event photographers, and corporate production companies to name a few.
The era of DVD dailies for film and television production has also arrived and products like the LX1 will make this kind of work extremely easy. It will allow facilities to reserve their authoring specialists for highly interactive, complex DVD projects while relegating the majority of the grunt work to the skill level of videotape recorder operation. In short, the LX1 fills a hole in DVD authoring that has long separated tape from disc as a storage, archive, and review medium.
Let's take a look at what comes in the box. The first thing you notice about the LX1 is the professional build quality. This unit would look right at home next to a high-end broadcast DigiBeta deck-it's ruggedized and rack-mountable. Similar VCR-style DVD recorders have been available for a while now but they are clearly more on a consumer/prosumer level of build next to the LX1. Also, most of the other VCR-style DVD recorders are limited to s-video and RCA inputs with a few featuring FireWire input. The LX1 has these and adds component input and balanced XLR audio inputs. Optional SDI and AESBU digital inputs are also available. The unit also outputs to these connections as well...