There were several little gadget products that may indeed meet the need of DV producers without incurring the costs of DVD production. These appliances allow producers to input video and create a VCD or S-VCD (Super Video CD). Datavideo showed their Datavideo VDR-1000. It is a standalone unit which looks like a home CD player that you can use to record digital or analog video and audio onto a CD (CD-R or CD-RW) in real time without connection to a PC or Mac. A standard 650MB CD-R, CD-R/W disc can hold up to 73 minutes video in VCD format or 37 minutes in S-VCD or DVD-Photo formats. Up to 98 tracks (scenes or photos) can be recorded on one CD, tracks can be played in any sequence and can contain video, audio or still images. CDs can be played back on the VDR-1000 and most VCD and DVD players. It features Composite, S-Video and stereo audio inputs & outputs with optional IEEE-1394 / iLink DV input for DV Camcorder, PC/IEEE1394-DV and Power Mac or iMac / DV direct interface video recording. My understanding is that this unit encodes in either MPEG1 or MPEG2 and sells for around $1599. For further info you can click to http://www.datavideo-tek.com/vdr-1000/vdr-1000.htm.

The folks from New Wave Technologies were showing a cool little piece from Terapin (http://www.goterapin.com) This box only encodes in MPEG1 and only has analog I/O but it only costs $599. It is a great way to distribute pre-viz or rough cuts from your editing system. You can record up to 74 minutes(in real time) on a 674MB/74 minute CD-R.  The best feature of the unit is that you can avoid huge encoding renders to get an MPEG1 file. Actually, it writes a finished VCD that will play on most DVD players and it plays on many DVD-RAM drives too. The quality is what you'd expect from MPEG1- the better your source the better the copy. So when you need an MPEG1 copy to distribute, this is a real time solution.

Sonic Foundry, makers of products like Sound Forge, Acid and now Vegas Video, announced the integration from within their Vegas application for digital content from libraries for pictures and sounds. Users can access the media content via the "Get Media" function found within the Vegas Video or VideoFactory application. Content includes stock video for broadcast, Internet and intranet broadcast, theme music, specialized music, various sound effects, 2-D and 3-D media, and 3-D models. Each partner site offers a variety of creative media content that is compatible with the Sonic Foundry's video software line of products, and offers fully downloadable media at a variety of price points. Partners include Artbeats, ACID loops, Videometry, INoiz.com, iMusic.com, Sounddogs.com. This represents the further evolution of on-line music libraries and this is one of the first implementations from within an application, Vegas Video.

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