Found: the iMac's missing link

I've been waiting for a product like the Formac Studio since I joined the digital video revolution just over a year ago, having bought an iMac and a DV camera.

With its iMovie editing software, Apple truly has brought desktop video production to the masses. It couldn't be easier. Just connect your DV camera to your iMac via FireWire interface, launch iMovie, import the video clips and start editing. But it's only after you've finished your first iMovie that you realise something important is missing: the ability to output your digital movie to analogue videotape.

But why, I hear you ask, would you want to convert crisp, sharp digital video to fuzzy old analogue? So you can watch your masterpiece on your TV rather than on your computer screen. Or send a tape to relatives, or, perhaps, the head of BBC light entertainment.

Then there's the matter of storage. Digital video eats up space on a hard drive like nothing you've ever seen. Sooner or later (probably sooner), that 12Gb hard drive will be full to bursting. While you do lose some quality in transferring DV to analog tape, it takes a sharp eye to notice. So having the option of storing on cheap VHS tapes is a plus.

Before now, transferring videos from DV to analog wasn't impossible to do, it was just very tedious. First you had to output your movie back to the camera – provided it has DV-in capabilities and, as I learnt to my dismay, not all of them do. Then you have to connect the camera to a VCR and copy it back on to VHS tape. Life's far too short.

Thankfully, the Formac Studio provides the missing link I'd been looking for. This oddly shaped little silver blob of plastic (it also comes with a much nicer looking clear case) converts digital video to analogue and vice versa, and connects to your Mac via FireWire and to a VCR via S-Video or Composite Video connections. It also has stereo sound inputs and outputs. You get a FireWire cable, but it would be nice if the other cables were also included.

Thus not only can you transfer your digital video to VHS tape, you can import analogue video to your Mac. In theory, copyright issues aside, you could transfer your favourite films to your computer, do your own editing and output them back to videotape. Never liked the director's cut? Then do your own. Or if you've been making home videos for years with an analog camera, the Formac Studio will allow you to transfer them to the computer and edit them.

As an added bonus, the Studio also comes with Pro TV software that turns your Mac into a TV and FM radio receiver. Just connect an antenna or cable TV lead to the Studio and you can channel-hop and Web-surf at the same time. You can even record TV programmes directly on to your computer in DV (provided you've got the space on that hard drive). Formac is said to be planning future products that will allow your Mac to function as a digital video recorder that you can program much as you do with a VCR. Now that would be interesting.

Before I bought the iMac, I owned a Performa, the much-maligned machine that predated Steve Jobs' return to Apple Computer and the birth of the iMac. Apart from the lack of a FireWire interface, it could do all of the things the Formac Studio now allows my iMac to do. That's progress for you. I can't help wondering why Apple doesn't put these useful features back into the iMac?

roger.ridey@independent.co.uk

Formac Studio, £319 (ex VAT). More information from www.formac.co.uk