Editing recordings made on the recorder

The DVDR3480 has some basic editing capabilities for recordings, but only for those made on rewriteable discs +RW or -RW. Previous Philips DVD recorders such as the DVDR880 onwards allowed a wider range of editing options on write-once +R media, as long as the discs hadn’t been finalised: for example you could divide a title, set chapter marks, or hide sections of the recording (eg adverts). Unfortunately none of this is possible on +R or –R discs in the DVDR3480, and before finalising a recording on these discs you are limited to protecting a title, adding/editing the name of it, and simply erasing a title. Of course if you erase something on a write-once disc, you don’t get the space back.

The DVDR3480 editing options are a little more flexible with rewriteable discs; in that you can divide a title and hide/unhide sections of the recording. Basically you select two time-points in the recording (‘A’ and ‘B’), then the bit in between gets hidden from playback (however do note that the disc space can’t be re-used either). All the details are covered in the manual, but below are four screenshots showing the very clear and intuitive menu arrangement for choosing a section of the recording to hide.

The first picture shows the editing display screen after choosing to hide a part of the recording:

The larger top video window is the whole title, and you navigate through it using the fast-forward (<FFW>) and fast-reverse (<REV>) buttons until you get to roughly where you want the first edit point to be. You can fast-forward up to 32x and it’s very quick. The scan speed is constantly displayed so you know how fast you’re going through the recording.

Pressing the <PLAY/PAUSE> button drops the playback down to 1x speed, and pressing it again stops it to a ‘pause’ state. From this point the <FFW> and <REV> buttons take on a much finer control to enable you to get to the exact edit point down to the group-of-pictures (GOP) level resolution: approximately half a second. Once you’re there, press <OK> and the edit point ‘A’ is set.

Exactly the same procedure is followed for setting the second edit point ‘B’:

Once the two markers ‘A’ and ‘B’ are set, pressing <OK> will make the recorder hide the section you have chosen; here marked in red on the timeline of the original recording window in the display:

If you later wish to unhide the section of recording, there is an option in the edit menu.

Mini-verdict

Once again this is a very intuitive on-screen display for hiding sections of recordings; very much like the kind of interface used on PC editing software. It also follows the pattern of other standalone DVD recorders such as Sony.

Technical encoding quality

Playback of AV formats