Casablanca Avio DVD Stand-Alone Digital Video Editor

By Jeffrey Hastings -- School Library Journal, 9/1/2005

MacroSystem US, 5485 Conestoga Court, Boulder, CO 80301 (303) 440-5311 www.casablanca.tv. $1,999.

About 15 years ago, I built a television studio in our library, and we began broadcasting a daily student-produced morning announcements program. The local cable franchise supplied the core equipment and many of those hefty, industrial-grade video production components still serve us today. Oh sure, there was that minor incident when some orange juice spilled directly onto a brand-new video titler—Zzaapp! But, hey, stuff happens—and I promised a shamefaced seventh grader, Shelby, that I’d never mention the unfortunate accident again. So I won’t. For the most part, though, that original TV equipment remains, hardwired and hard-nosed, ready to do its job at 7:45 a.m. each school day.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the PC/Mac-based digital video editors I’ve tried to incorporate into the studio. They’ve been, well, a bit less robust. The average personal computer has a functional life of about three years, and so it was with these editing packages; they just didn’t last, and, in a school on a budget, three years is a very short time. Most personal computer-based editing systems disappoint in two areas. First, the computers themselves lack the available video outputs to broadcast your programs and, secondly, the platforms eventually succumb to all the annoying stuff that plagues computers: memory issues, crashes, and constant software “upgrades” that don’t always work.

That’s why I was so eager to test the Casablanca Avio DVD. It’s a stand-alone editing system built to do just one thing—make videos. Just as importantly, it has all the hardware you need to get your videos on-screen. You can use the DVD-Arabesk software to burn a DVD, or use the built-in outputs to send out a video in composite, S-Video, or DV modes.

It’s easy to use, too. I recruited a sixth grader to interview a retiring assistant principal. Just a minute or two into my tutorial demonstrations, she rolled her eyes as if to say, “If you left me alone now, I could get this thing done.” I took the hint. When I returned from lunch, the piece was, as they say in the biz, “in the can.”

While the Casablanca Avio DVD is by no means the most sophisticated digital editing system I’ve ever used, it offers lots of things that are important to educators: simplicity, functionality, and stand-alone reliability. Keep the orange juice away from it, and it may just last a decade or more.