Videomaker 2007 Best Products of the Year (page 6)

The LaCie d2 Quadro hard drive is a versatile storage solution with great performance. Its quad-interface (i.e., USB 2.0, FireWire 400, FireWire 800, eSATA) allows users multiple options for connecting this hard drive to a multitude of different computers. Power users will benefit from the eSATA connection, which has a much faster data throughput. LaCie d2 Quadro hard drive also impressed us with its easy setup for both Mac and PC users, making it simple to work with from the get-go.

The Elgato Turbo.264 is a perfect enhancement for anyone compressing H.264 files routinely. It has a simple user interface with presets that helps new users get their files conformed to various devices. Additionally, its hardware dramatically decreases the time that it takes to compress these processor-intensive compression algorithms. So, it is especially useful for people with slower processors or with video files that run a little long (anything over about 10 minutes). The GUI is also fun to look at, with its graphical odometer and frames-per-second readout that lets you can see how fast it's encoding. If anything, it'll make your editing buddies extremely jealous.

Congratulations to this year's winners and their respective product teams that brought these video production tools to life. It has been an amazing year - seeing the continuation of the HD format wars, more AVCHD support trickling in and more emphasis with online video. We are very excited to see what 2008 brings. Make sure you follow along with us and read the latest digital video production reviews from Videomaker.

For a product to qualify for an award, it must have shipped in the 2007 calendar year, and it must have passed through Videomaker headquarters for examination by our editors. From there, we judged products based on the following seven criteria:

1. Empowerment: how successful the product is at helping videographers be more effective at video production.
2. Quality: it must be put together well, be durable and show excellence in its category.
3. Usability: how user-friendly it is.
4. Innovation: it should have some inventive or original features.
5. Performance: it must work consistently, be effective and provide a good value for the price.

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