Q I'm on a 50th-reunion committee for our football team. I have a DVD that came from a transfer of a 16-millimeter game film. The hope is to give each team member a copy of the DVD at the reunion. The film has one play immediately following the next. I would like to get some blank space between the plays to put a text box with comments such as "Joe makes a nice block here," or put text directly over the play. Is this possible for a casual computer user, and is there an inexpensive program that will work?
A Adobe Premiere Elements 8 sells for less than $100 and can import footage from DVDs that are not copy protected. You can then add blank spaces, insert text wherever you want (including over plays) and create a new DVD. You can even add a menu with chapters. Included tutorials will guide you through the process. Once the disc has been created, be sure to save it so you do not have to re-encode everything every time you burn a copy of the DVD.
Missing balance control Q I am interested in the $35 Dayton amplifier that you wrote about recently. It doesn't seem to have a balance control for the speakers. Wouldn't that be a big disadvantage?
A You are correct that the DTA-1 does not have a balance control, but that's not a big deal. It might be a small disadvantage, but it depends on your room, the speaker placement and what signal sources you will be using.
If your speakers are placed properly in the room, the lack of a balance control should not be a problem. Balance controls are most useful with analog sources such as vinyl records, where you might sometimes get slight balance differences at the source. With digital sources such as iPods, CD players and DVD players, the left-right balance is as precise as the master tape used to create the disc.
If you explore the market, you will find that amplifiers without balance controls are not limited to inexpensive gear such as the Dayton DTA-1. For example, the $799 Neuhaus Laboratories T-2 vacuum tube amplifier I wrote about recently doesn't have a balance control, either.
If you must have a balance control, you can buy a second DTA-1 and get a Y-cable to split the audio output. Use one DTA-1 to drive the right speaker and one to drive the left speaker, and then adjust the amplifiers independently to get the balance you want. This would cost $70, though. At that point, you should look for a refurbished stereo receiver from Onkyo for $100 instead. It won't be as small as the DTA-1 and won't work on batteries, but it would give you much more for your money.
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