The video craze is about to hit again as people are already starting to buying digital video cameras to record the Christmas festivities.

Now a new product from Pinnacle Systems allows you to turn your Christmas bloatfest movie into an epic to rival Ben Hur.

All you need is a laptop computer and a copy of Pinnacle Studio DV Mobile.

The first part of creating movies on your PC is capturing your footage.

With Studio DV all you need to do is link your camcorder to your laptop and get stuck in.

The software lets you view thumbnails of each individual scene which you can drag and drop into the edit timeline to create a digital masterpiece.

The software also allowed me to capture my footage as MPEG2 files and direct from Sony's new MicroMV camera. I believe this is currently the only product to offer both formats.

Another important feature is the file compression.

SmartCapture lets you capture an hour of DV video at preview quality in 400Mb of disk space.

Other editing programmes take 14Gb to do the same job.

This package is easy to use and suitable for almost anyone.

It comes with a PCMCIA card firewire port system that allows you to download into your laptop even if you don't have an onboard firewire port.

Price: £119.99.

Contact: www.pinnaclesys.com
Feel good factor: 8 out of 10.