Any Digital Video user will have experienced problems when connecting two DV devices to an NLE system. Either the computer sees only one device, or it sees nothing, or worse it locks up or crashes.

Datavideo's SMART DV (patent pending) feature was developed to overcome this problem. SMART DV has been incorporated into the latest Datavideo DAC-10 & DAC-30 digital converters and the TLM-70D 7" LCD DV monitor. Customers with older versions of these models can contact their local Datavideo distributor for a free of charge firmware upgrade.

With the SMART DV feature enabled the converter or monitor becomes transparent to the computer, while still transcoding the live DV stream in to analogue video.

This enables users to monitor a live digital video feed from a DV camcorder or DV deck during capture, or monitor the DV Stream from an NLE system via an ordinary video monitor, while exporting the edited video. SMART DV also allows copying to DV and analogue at the same time.

Disabling the SMART DV feature (simply done using dip switch on the back of the DAC) returns the DAC to a normal bi-directional Digital Analogue Converter, which is seen by the computer as a normal DV Device.