The Portable GR-DVM1 Mini DV Camcorder (page 3)

Roll Out the Titles

ColorWriter Magic Video Titler
($249)
Sima Products Corporation
6153 Mulford Street
Niles, IL 60714
(800) 345-7462
http://www.simacorp.com

tech specs

After you've purchased a camcorder, a decent editing VCR and a microphone or two, what's the next step you'll need to take in order to expand your arsenal of video editing hardware? Chances are, you'll want to put some text on the screen now and again. So unless you intend to record your own pen-and-ink titles with your camcorder, you'll probably want to invest in a video titler.

Stand-alone video titlers come in many shapes and sizes. Depending on their features and performance, consumer titlers (also referred to as character generators or CGs) can range in price from a few hundred to several thousand dollars. Sima's ColorWriter Magic sits at the low end of the consumer titler price range, offering basic functionality and a handful of simple text-based effects for enhancing your videos. Can such an inexpensive unit perform at a basic level of quality--one that won't make your videos look too crummy to show to relatives? Let's find out.

Cue the Title

The ColorWriter Magic is easy to install. Just plug a video source into the inputs, connect the output of the unit to a VCR for recording, hook up the power source and you're ready to go. The ColorWriter Magic will accept either composite (RCA-style) or Y/C (S-video) cables; audio connectors are provided to make setup easier, but the unit won't affect your audio in any way.

Before you begin titling, it's a good idea to familiarize yourself with some of the controls available on the ColorWriter Magic. Like other stand-alone character generators, it organizes titles into a number of pages, each of which can be recalled for display or editing. To insert a title that you've created over your video footage, for example, you'd press the Page key, followed by the number of the title page you want to display, followed by the Insert button. If you wanted to make that title scroll up the page, pressing the Scroll Up button before you press Insert would accomplish this for you. Other effects available include Scroll Sideways, Zoom, Fade, and six Special Effect options (which are basically combinations of existing zooms, fades and scrolls).

Creating a title with the ColorWriter Magic is as simple as selecting the appropriate page, pressing the Create button and typing away. It's a simple matter to choose a size, a color, a border, a background and/or a box for your titles as you work on them. Also available are a number of text-placement options, such as center, line shift, page shift, and others. Cursor-movement keys located on the right-hand side of the unit make it easy to select a start point and begin typing.

The Nitty Gritty

Typing titles with the ColorWriter Magic's poorly designed keyboard can be quite a chore. You must press each key fairly hard in order to make a character appear on the screen--not a situation that's conducive to the quick entering of titles.

If you're looking for a wide range of font and style choices, the ColorWriter Magic isn't the best choice. You can create titles in only a single, sans-serif font that looks about as good as the scoreboard numbers in a circa-1975 electronic Pong game. This is perhaps the ColorWriter's biggest flaw: it gives you only one low-quality font to work with.

Some of the effects on the ColorWriter don't operate as well as they should. For example, the Fader on our test unit had a tendency to blink the title on and off briefly before performing the fade. Likewise, the Scroll command seemed to make the whole title move in tiny, stuttering steps instead of a smooth motion across the screen.

In fact, you should consider the ColorWriter Magic only if your budget restrictions and need for a titler are both very great. The output resolution is unacceptable for all but the most basic projects, and the choices available for colors and styles are very limited. It might be useful for archival purposes, such as logging the contents of a tape or something similar, but the built-in titler that's available on some camcorders will out-perform it. In the world of consumer video gear, the phrase "you get what you pay for" is all too often true--and the ColorWriter Magic is no exception.