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.