3dfx Voodoo3 3500 TV

Video Editing

The 3500 does come bundled with a copy of Ulead's Video Studio for editing things like home videos, once again keeping in mind that the 3500 was not intended to be a professional home video editing solution.   Video Studio isn't an outstanding program at all, actually its only strong point is its ease of use as it pales in comparison to more professional packages such as Premier and even the professional version of the Ulead package.  It's not bad for a free piece of bundled software, but it's not great either.

Click to Enlarge	Click to Enlarge

The 3500 supports full motion video captures of up to 720 x 480 (NTSC) or 720 x 576 (PAL) in either uncompressed AVI format or using MPEG-2 compression.  This obviously doesn't leave you with a handful of options to choose from when capturing video, and our basic counting skills tells us we're left with two options, AVI or MPEG-2.  For the home user, the better option would be MPEG-2, however an even better option is a not included but definitely desired support for Motion JPEG which is what the Matrox Marvel G200 uses.  MJPEG manages disk space much better than both of the above storage methods and is much better for video editing, if you plan on editing more than a couple minutes of video on the 3500 then be prepared to eat up a lot of hard disk space.  In the end, MJPEG can always be converted to MPEG-2, so the 3500's video capture feature does leave a little more to be desired from.  In retrospect, the Matrox Marvel G200 couldn't hold the 3500's jock in terms of gaming performance.

It's a tradeoff, but once again, the 3500 TV was never intended to be a high quality video editing solution, rather a cool set of multimedia add-ons to a hard core gaming solution.

Click here to find lowest prices on this product.