MINITESTS

BASIC ENTITLEMENT

Title generators are becoming increasingly sophisticated, which is good, but it’s getting to the point where you can spend more time creating titles, than making the recording in the first place, and still end up with something that looks like a dog’s dinner! There’s no chance of that with the Panasonic VW-VT1 title superimposer. It’s back to basics with a vengence, a simple, no-nonsense titler that’s not going to burn a hole in your pocket either. The price is just £133, which is not a bad deal considering it’s S-Video compatible as well. The titler is easy to set up and use, it connects between the camcorder and VCR when copying or editing, superimposing the titles on the recorded video.

The VT1 can create up to 6 pages using a single typeface. It’s a little blocky but it looks clean and is easy to read. There’s a choice of four character sizes, giving four display layouts of 24 characters on 12 lines, 14 characters on 6 lines, 9 charcters on 4 lines, and 7 characters on 3 lines. The international character set contains letters and symbols for German, French, Spanish and Italian, as well as English, though there’s no pound sign. There’s a choice of 8 character colours (white, yellow, magenta, red, black, blue, green and cyan) and an outline option; you can’t mix sizes, or colours on a page. It has only three transition effects, on/off superimpose, and scroll page up or down.

The titler has just two modes, edit and record; in the edit mode all character positions are shown, with the current position shown by a flashing cursor, this can be moved anywhere on the display field by four direction buttons. In the record mode the blank spaces dissappear, ready for the title to be cued. It’s basic and very easy to use; you can create quite decent-looking titles in just a couple of minutes. If that’s all you want -- and there’s nothing wrong with keeping titles simple and to the point -- then the VT1 has a lot going for it.

SPECIFICATION

Make/model        Panasonic VW-VT1 Title Superimposer

Guide Price         £133

Features              6-pages, 4-character sizes, 8 display colours, up/down scroll, European character set, S-VHS compatible

Layout       24 characters x 12-lines/14 x 6/9 x 4/7x 3

Sockets                composite video in/out (phono) S-Video in/out (mini DIN) DC power

Power supply          8 volts DC

Accessories          mains adaptor, hard carry case

Dimensions         75 x 51 x 43mm

Distributor         PANASONIC UK LTD., Panasonic House, Willoughby Road, Bracknell, Berkshire RG12 4PF. Telephone (0344) 862444

VIDEO CAMERA RATING 9

Simple and effective

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Ó R.Maybury 1994 XXXX