In NLE operation, the video signal to and from the computer is usually DV over a standard IEEE1394 aka Firewire aka i-Link cable. Video clips are stored on the computer hard drive, normally at full resolution (DV runs at 3.6 MB/sec, so 1 hour of DV takes up 13 GB disk space). Video is edited with NLE programs such as Adobe Premiere, Ulead MediaStudio Pro, Apple Final Cut Pro, or others. The finished video program is written back to a DV camera or deck using the firewire cable again, or transcoded to other formats (eg. MPEG) to create Web, CDROM, or DVD based video productions.
If you're researching firewire hardware, I highly recommend Pat Leong's Firewire Card/NLE page, which has an impressively complete collection of NLE card specs/comparisons, and also a collection of useful editing tips (many general-purpose) from the Canopus DVRex user's forum. One site that sells a selection of NLE equipment is the The Electronic Mailbox, and Pat lists some others as well. I don't know anything about the new inexpensive, generic Firewire cards myself, but if you have one, the "Scenalyser" program from scenalyser.com website may help you get the most out of it.
Forums and Information: The Worldwide User's Group has forums for a wide range of NLE and sound editing programs. If you use Adobe Premiere, there are some tips from Adobe. 2-pop.com has many discussion boards including one for Premiere. There are some useful Premiere tutorial pages at www.liv.ac.uk Liverpool University. You can see some DV capture cards compared.
Mac Users: If you do video editing on a Mac (or even if you don't) I recommend 2-pop.com about Final Cut Pro and lots of other digital video info and discussion. Look at the Mac DV mailing lists as well. Check out Promax and Digital Origin for NLE products. You can download Digital Origin's $130 "EditDV unplugged" product for a free 30-day trial. www.nowonder.com has general-purpose forums for both Mac and Windows.
For best results you'll want to adjust brightness and contrast of your digital images so they end up as legal video (in NTSC systems in the US, the analog video levels are specified at 7.5 to 100 IRE). I find you can exceed 100 IRE a little without bad effect on my VCRs; but broadcast systems may clip right at 100. You can use this greyscale to see how your camera responds. The numbers in that image are % white value, which is somehow related to, but in general not equal to, IRE level on video output. In computer graphics, RGB images use the full range from 0/0/0 to 255/255/255 so it may surprise you to learn that most NLE video systems with DV codecs use a 6% luminance (RGB=16/16/16) as "full black" and 92% (RGB=235/235/235) as "full white" (for much more detail see this article from dv.com and Adam Wilt's notes. ) Luminance values outside that range will be clipped black or white, on a properly set-up video monitor, so if you're importing scans or graphics you want to adjust their luminance range to fall in the range 6..92% for proper video output. To learn a little bit about video signals and what IRE units are, see my measurements page. For much more in-depth information visit the Tektronix NTSC Video Measurements site.
It turns out that the very same JPEG file transferred via memory device (compact flash) or via NLE/firewire (Adobe Premiere or Raptor Edit) comes out differently from the camera's analog output. In my camera, from flash card (where 0%=(0,0,0 black) and 100%=(255,255,255 white)), I find that 0% white = 0 IRE out and 95% = 109 IRE out from the composite video jack (it does not increase after 95%). From firewire, 0% = -7 IRE and 100% = 108 IRE. To have legal NTSC video (7.5 IRE minimum) you must not have any pixel darker than 13% white for firewire, or 3% white for flash memory. Also, with flash you should note that there is no change in the analog output signal (saturated) beyond 95% white. Images transferred via firewire do not show this saturation near 100% white.
You can load these colorbars onto a floppy disk, flash card or memory stick and play them back in your TRV900. With my camera, the resulting signal is close to the levels from my Newtek Calibar test generator. Note, the image on your computer screen will appear more dull, that is, darker and less saturated than the same image on a TV screen. If instead you are editing by firewire, you can load these bars (PNG format) into Premiere, which when sent to the camera through the DVRaptor firewire card, generate an analog video output from the camera that accurately matches my Calibar signal (unlike Premiere 6.0's own colorbars). I have no idea how consistently different TRV900 cameras reproduce levels. If you really need accurate results, you'll want to use a real test pattern generator. An accurately adjusted monitor is important for quality work, so if you aren't familiar with monitor setup already, examine this monitor setup page from VideoUniversity.
Fixing the Problems A BusLogic SCSI card and the onboard USB host controller share IRQ 9, the other devices have their own IRQ (important). I initially had a lot of "glitches" when attempting to capture video or even audio with this system, even though the CPU and disks are plenty fast enough. I got the Norton antivirus 2000 program to test for a virus, but nothing found (it takes a while to scan the 35000 odd files on my many hard drives). I even resorted to a clean reinstall of Windows 98, but that didn't help.Motherboard:Iwill BD100Plus, Intel 440BX chipset. P3/500 MHz, 128MB SDRAM. Firewire card: Canopus DVRaptor with Adobe Premiere 5.1a and Raptor Edit Video Card: ATI Expert@Play 98, AGP slot. Supports overlay from DVRaptor. Has video out feature, but that doesn't work with Iwill M/B. Soundcard: Turtle Beach Systems Fiji, which I use with CoolEdit 96. Video storage: * Promise FastTrak33 with two Maxtor 91303D6 12Gig drives. also, IBM 20Gig 7200rpm EIDE drive. Mouse: Logitech wheelmouse (PS/2) for timeline scrubbing in Raptor Video. PCMCIA reader: Antec PhotoChute USB (problematic, see below) Spare Camera: I leave my TR7000 Digital8 on the DVraptor as a DV codec. * FastTrack 33 and Iwill M/B have timing conflict(?) I advise against this combination.
I eventually tracked down many different problems, which I describe here in case you have a similar circumstance. First, the Antec PhotoChute USB PCMCIA card reader driver software causes many brief system "freezes" from time to time. It is hot-pluggable so I simply unplug it when I capture video or audio (but I'd still rather not have to do this). The second glitch was apparently caused by a FastTrak monitoring utility (FastCheck) and when I uninstalled that utility, the whole system worked better. Except for a third, very infrequent playback problem similar to (but not) tape dropout. This was caused by several things: a bad connection (a loose firewire connector), Win98 configuration problem, a bus-hogging VGA card, and the disk drives overheating. The config problem was solved by changing two settings: in System Properties/Performance/Virtual Memory, deselect "Let Windows manage my memory" and select a specific hard drive (different from your video drive) with Min=Max=2x physical RAM size (I entered 256MB since I have 128M RAM). Also, under System Properties/Performance/File System select "Desktop computer" as the "typical role of this computer". I also found that PCI and AGP "accelerated" VGA cards (and all of them are accelerated nowadays, even the $20 ones) can cause problems (as mentioned at zefiro.com). In Win98 "Display Properties-> Settings -> Advanced -> Performance" I selected "Hardware acceleration: None" instead of "Full", and the glitches went away. Maybe I could use an intermediate VGA acceleration setting safely, but I've found "Full" was not compatible with reliably clean video from the DVRaptor. I took the cover off the PC and directed a fan on the disk drives to cool them. Your milage, of course, may vary. Good luck!
When I did the fresh install of Windows, reinstalling all my drivers was enough of a pain to prompt me to buy Drive Image from PowerQuest. This takes a "snapshot" of an entire disk partition including all hidden and system files and boot record. I've burned an image of my C: drive working configuration to a CD-ROM, so I can restore to a known working condition more easily.
Overall I like the Canopus DVRaptor. With this card, in order to have a
real-time playback and preview, you need to have a DV-in and analog-out
capable device connected to your computer whenever you are editing. My
TR7000 Digital 8 camera normally serves this purpose, sending s-video to an
external Panasonic CT-1384Y (cheap, not great) video monitor. I like this
system much better than the DV2000 card on a 200 MHz Pentium2 that I used
earlier (see below).
Premiere 6 should work with any OHCI compliant interface card as long as
you're using it in a supporting OS - I'm assuming that you're talking
windows here so that's 98, ME or 2000 (for Mac it's OS9 or later). Third
party proprietary capture cards, on the other hand, have to have their
drivers re-tooled in order to work with it and many are in the process of
doing that right now. For a listing of Adobe certified capture cards check
this link.
www.adobe.com/products/premiere/hdwr.html
As for the codec issue. If you're going OHCI (cheap solution) then you're
most likely to be using the latest Microsoft dv codec, which I hear isn't
bad but it's also not the best in terms of quality or speed. To insure that
you're using the latest you'd need to have the latest version of DirectX
installed. There are other alternatives to the MS codec that you can use.
Main Concept's codec is reported to be a better alternative and there's a
"hack" for using it with Premiere 6 found here:
If you're going the 3rd party capture card route (more expensive, but
arguably better in terms of quality and speed depending upon the card/codec
in question) then I'd recommend any of the Canopus products. EZDV is their
intro model and the Canopus codec is considered one of the best by many.
Their drivers are in the queue at Adobe for certification right now and
should be available very soon. They do have beta drivers available now that
are serviceable but not perfect.
OHCI performance is tied to the system and you'll need a beefy machine - the
faster processor the better. 3rd party cards usually have hardware or camera
assisted codecs (this equates to faster rendering times) and require less
system resources to perform well. Each solution has it's advantages - OCHI
is cheap, has growing support in the industry, and codecs for it should
continue to improve. Proprietary solutions are typically enhanced to provide
better performance and quality.
Douglas Spotted Eagle has some really great articles on
OHCI and codecs at the WorldWideUsersGroups website (great place for DV,
NLE, Audio info and more, btw). He's done some very detailed testing
including most of the current stuff available today. Here's the link one of
his articles at wwwug.com:
Inexpensive Firewire cards for DV.
Dave
[Note: Adobe has some additional driver software for Premiere 6.0, eg.
specific to Sony VAIO computers, here:
SonySwitcher 2.0.
Thanks Tucson Ron for pointing this out. -jpb]
What's Required to Capture DV from TRV900 to Premiere 6?
Date: 10 Mar 2001
From: d.cluck (anim8r ev1 net)
Subject: Firewire cable causes damage
Date: March 22, 2001
From: Jim De Arras
The 6 pin to 4 pin cable comes with the CompUSA PCI 1394 Firewire host adaptor, SKU # 274516 is badly miswired. It destroys whatever is connected to the 4 pin side when the 6 pin side is on a powered connector. I dissected one, on the 6 pin side, and found that of the 4 signal wires in the cable, 2 are ties to pins 1 and 2 on the 6 pin side, these are the power source pins, and obviously what is frying the 4 pin end. The cable shield is connected to pin 3, a signal line, and the other two signal leads are connected to 5 and 4. The signal pairs should be 3 and 4; 5 and 6.
I did not dissect the 4 pin end, it is too small, and the molded ends would make it nearly impossible to determine pinout, so I do not know what the correct pairing would have been, but it's clear from the 6 pin end that the cable is totally wrong, and toxic to boot.
The cable is black, kind of thin wire. The cable itself is labeled VW-1 COPARTNER, but that is the wire brand, nothing wrong with the wire as far as I can tell. The connectors are nicely injection molded, also black, and carry only the firewire logo on the 6 pin end, no branding I can see anywhere else. I bought three of the CompUSA branded Firewire cards, and all the cables are bad. Took a while, and a blown FX190 and TRV900 before I put the pieces together. The cards all work fine, I have a wide selection of cables, and did not initially use the "free" cables, as they were too short for my setup. But I was setting up for portable operation with my new :( Vaio FX190 and a Belkin firewire hub, when all this came to light. I was testing capture to a firewire drive, hence the hub. Worked with long cables, then I dug these out so there would be less bulk in my case, and things started failing.
Jim De Arras
I had the exact same problem with COMPUSA firewire camera.. Basically that cable killed my brother in law's TRV-320 and my new PV-DV400 (basically it worked when we plugged it into my system originally which used a BELKIN firewire cable), but when we plugged it into his new compusa card with the firewire cable, our camera's firewire ports didn't work anymore.. Since then, we returned the firewire card to compusa and got different brands, furthermore - we had warranty work done on our cams to get the firewire ports fixed..
-George Daswani (georgedaswani hotmail com)
In early 1999 I got the Bravado DV2000 card which is a IEEE1394 interface card (actually, the Radius MotoDV board) bundled with Adobe Premiere 5.0. You can D/L the Premiere 5.1 update over the web from Adobe, once you have 5.0 installed. The DV2000 came with the MotoDV driver 1.1.2 and again, you can download the 1.1.3 driver update over the web from Truevision. For $500 the package is a low-cost entry into non-linear editing (NLE). So far I've produced three "header" segments combining stills, titles, video shorts, soundtracks, and transitions. Each segment was about 30 seconds total. The NLE concept is great, you can do many things that are difficult in linear editing, and many more that would otherwise be impossible.
So far so good. The main problem is that either my computer, or Premiere/MotoDV, or at least that combination, is rather unstable. I averaged about 5 crash/reboot cycles for each 30 second segment I produced. Each crash was unique- Adobe 5.1/MotoDV 1.1.3 seems to be capable of crashing anywhere including during startup before I've done anything at all. I run Win98 on a Pentium 200/MMX with 15 gig disk space. I haven't heard this much trouble from other Premiere 5.1 users so it may be my system. The conventional wisdom is that the Mac is a better NLE platform, and if you must use Windows, use a dedicated system with no extraneous peripherals. I do notice my system very seldom crashes when I'm not doing video editing.
The other problem is that NLE is very time-consuming relative to linear editing, even without the crashes. At least in my experience so far- I'm not yet very familiar with Premiere, and of course I'm trying to do transitions and align soundtracks that you'd need much fancier hardware to do as a linear edit. This may be the same phenomenon as the two-hour computer drawing that would have been five minutes as a pencil sketch... with the computer's many options and "undo" features, you tend to indulge your perfectionist tendencies. Also, rendering isn't fast: Premiere 5.1 takes about 15 minutes to do "make movie" (Radius SoftDV codec) for a 30-second segment on my P200/MMX system. That is, 30x slower than real-time. The disk isn't in constant use so I assume a faster CPU would help.
I'm writing my header/title segments to DV tape after the main sequence I recorded, then I have to assemble the various recorded-live and NLE-produced parts of the program by hand with my regular VCR to make my final tape. I'd like to get the whole program assembled in the DV format but don't have the disk space to store longer segments. For this reason I'm planning to get the Sony GV-D900 MiniDV "Video Walkman", which is a portable DV VCR with analog and firewire IN/OUT, plus a 5.5" LCD screen. Street price is about $1700, or $1000 for the GV-D300 which is the same but lacks the screen. For assembly edits, it should be faster, cheaper and easier to use than a NLE system with the size hard drive you'd need for 1 or 1.5 hours of video.
There is some reason to consider another camera instead of a video walkman
for price and flexibility. It isn't clear to me that the camera's tape
transport mechanism is any different in reliability than the walkman. You
might consider the TRV9 which uses the same MiniDV tape as the TRV900, or
the less expensive Digital8 cameras, such as the DCR-TR7000 or TRV-103. For
copying the DV signal from one deck or camera to another over firewire,
there's essentially no loss, so you don't absolutely need the second deck
to be able to read the original camera's tape format. The Digital8 cameras
are cheaper: Supreme Video had the
TR7000 for $700 last I checked. And of course you'd have a backup
camera. Note that the current Digital8 models do not support dubbing a
second audio track later, like Sony's MiniDV models can.
Warren sent me an email describing the GV-D900, which I soon thereafter
bought myself (my review is here).
<< You mention getting the GV-D900 Video Walkman. Have you tried any editing
or transfer over firewire between the TRV900 and the Walkman? It looks like
the perfect unit for that kind of edit, and since it's portable it could even
be done in the field- more convenient than the VCR powered off an inverter in
my car, which I've used before! >>
Yes, I have. I first bought the GV-D900 because my 10 month old JVC Cybercam
didn't have a IEEE (Firewire) connection. Rather than get a new camera, I
bought the GV-D900 (which has a variety of I/O including IEEE) and just jammed
the tape into it for transfer into the Radius card. It works just fine. The
Radius controls the GV-D900 from the screen. (Obviously, it doesn't matter if
the tape was recorded on my new Sony TRV 900 or the JVC Cybercam.)
And, yes, it can do a 20 segment assemble by controlling the TRV900 over the
FireWire. Very snazzy.
I saw a great editing accessory for the GV-D900 (Assemble Editor - DSRM-E1) at
the Digital Video Expo in Pasadena a few weeks ago. It's mentioned on the
Sony web site. It gives you a whole digital editing setup with nifty jog
shuttle control of the GV-D900 that fits on an airline tray table. Just
simple cuts, but very handy and powerful. Check it out:
"ASSEMBLE EDITING
Sony DV-D900 Video Walkman
By using your Video Walkman VCR as your playback unit the built in
assemble editor lets you mark cut-in and cut-out points for up to 20
separate scenes. The Video Walkman unit allows you to control almost any
remote capable camcorder or VCR, via infrared signals, as your recorder.
To use the Video Walkman unit as your recorder, there is an optional
Assemble Editor (DSRM-E1) required. "
Warren
Note: I have since purchased this unit. See my review here. Crazy as it sounds I'm tempted also to get the
lowest end Digital-8 Camcorder, the DCR-TR7000 currently about $700
mail-order (4/99). [I tried a digital 8 camera in this mode (see here) and it works] Reason: the D8's can play and record
through firewire, making them the cheapest digital VCR currently
available. This would give me three digital VCRS (TRV900, D900, and TR7000)
and I could do linear editing (A/B roll etc) without suffering from an
analog storage format eg. SVHS. The video mixer would still have to be
analog, there's no consumer digital mixer yet, but the quality loss there
can be minimal. Linear editing is much faster than any NLE system I can
afford now. Digital NLE with Premiere 5.1 is so slow that I don't have time
to do as much editing as I'd like.
NLE Editing: DV2000 doesn't measure up, yet
To: beale@best.com
From: "Sean O'Sullivan"
Subject: TRV900 with NLE
John:
I bought a Sony TRV900, based in large part off the info I found on your
FAQ... thanks... you mentioned in your FAQ you're interested in how it
works with NLE, and so far, unfortunately, I'd have to say not very well...
not because of the TRV900, but because of the DV support from software/
drivers isn't very good, not just with Premiere, which is what I've been
using, but really with any of the products shipping commercially today
(without spending >$2k for a dedicated hardware card). Basically, my
experience is similar to the other person who sent you an e-mail, that it
takes an unbearably long time to render, etc. I've heard some mixed
reports of better results from the Pinnacle DV300 card via a beta driver
that's supposed to come out in a few days. And, I've heard of good results
on the Mac, via the Promax.com firecard-c solution, which allows sampling
in order to get responsive NLE. (But I'm a PC guy!)
I'm actually going to be going through analog rather than using the DV input,
until better driver support comes out (which will probably be fairly soon,
anyway)... I'm using the Truevision DV2000... a note I posted to another
user who was asking about PC configuration, etc, is below. In particular
note that the Quicktime Pro software *does* work great, right now, for cuts
only editing.
Thanks for your great FAQ!
Sean
RE: Ultra DMA Hard Drives...Good enough for Premiere editing?
By Sean O'Sullivan
I use Ultra DMA drives with my Bravado DV2000, and I have NO PROBLEM with
the captures, playback, etc. I highly recommend the Promise FASTTRAK
controller; not only is this PCI controller reasonably priced at ~$130 (or
$150 if you pick one up at COMPUSA), it gave me the easiest install of
hard drives ever, no problems at all, plug and play.
Of course, the real reason to get the fasttrak controller is to use it's
RAID 0 capability for striping multiple hard drives together; by using
striping, your hard drives work in parallel and pretend they are one big
disk. You'd think this could be messy or complicated, but it's NOT.
I'm sure there are other controllers that do this, but Fasttrak seems
to specialize in video, and the product can be bought from most of the
direct mail people who sell video stuff for the PC.
I have the slowest/cheapest possible drives, 5400 RPM, two Maxstor 7.4GBs
and two Western Digital 8.4s, all plugged into the same Fasttrak controller
and I get 16MB/s... BTW, they don't recommend using different type drives,
they should be the same size and similar performance, but I tried it and
it works anyway, no fuss no muss. Total cost, less than $1000 for 30GB
of fast, reliable storage, all on one huge "D" drive... just by
picking up whatever drives were on sale at COMPUSA that week. I'm jealous,
it's two months later and now the price point is $1000 for 40GB.
Of course, if you are only able to put one drive into your chasis, then
all this advice is useless... BTW, another benefit of getting the 5400RPM
drives is that they run cooler, so you can put more of them in without
overheating... I actually only had space for two extra drives in my
mini-tower, but I used mounting rails to connect my additional drives below
where the drive bays stopped.
But not all my news is good. I'd recommend *against* getting the DV2000 card
for use with Premiere until they've got timeline scrubbing to DV and lower
resolution sampling in the driver. As the card is a Radius card, maybe
it's Radius's fault, not Truevision's, but the card, while it "works" right
now, is simply unusable without being able to see what's going on via your
NTSC monitor, IMHO. (You have to finish editing your program, export/render
it out (which can, depending on the length of your program, take a few
hours (I'm working on a 10 minute program right now that takes about 2 hours
to output), and then, finally, you can "Print to Radius DV", which works
as long as the export worked. In my case, for some godforsaken, unknown
reason, and it's not the 2GB limit, it takes an hour to output render the
second half of my program, everything seems fine, but the actual output file
of 1.5GB that comes up is completely blank with no video track (HELP! anyone?)
Another problem I'm having with the drivers is that the audio track will
kick out and not playback after I do a couple of edits... coming back
into the program, it works again for a few edits... (HELP!) So, while it
"works" (and by the way it is at least somewhat usable with 5.1, but
it was completely unusable IMHO with 5.0, so upgrade before trying anything),
it's such a struggle that it isn't worth it. Rent someone's setup rather
than get this equipment at this point in time.
BTW, the drivers and the card do work GREAT when used with Quicktime PRO and
Radius DVPlayer... you can do remarkable cuts only editing, no render time,
no
output time, no problem, fantastic performance, no sound problems etc. And
the output file takes no space (a couple of Kb), using dependencies. It
gives me hope as to what can be done when the software catches up with the
hardware. (I've just done a few experiments with this, but I'm very
impressed). And QT Pro is an extremely simple and accurate way of assembling
files much greater than 2GB.
Truevision indicates that they've got a new driver in beta, and some special
premiere deck control plug ins coming out in just a few weeks. Save
yourself the misery and wait for that or consider the DV300 from Pinnacle,
which is going into beta this Thursday, according to a post from the
Pinnacle guy Ron. That version sounds like it may do it, and you can
get the beta driver; Truevision didn't want to give me the beta driver,
and so I'm debating returning the card before my 30 days runs out or
hanging on to it and praying that it does everything I want it to when
it comes out in a few weeks. If I have enough time to deal with UPS, I'd
return the card, unwillingly but justly.
Good luck!
Sean
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
current system: Win98/PII 300Mhz/196MB RAM/30 GB Raid0 Promise Fasttrack/
Premiere 5.1/Bravado DV2000/Sony hi-8 cams & Sony DCR TRV900 cam/Buz/
Jaz/Sony NTSC monitor
getting system: Targa 1000 Pro Workstation (NT/PII 400MHz/128 MB/9.1GB SCSI/
Premiere 5.1/Avid MCXpress/Targa 1000 Pro) upgraded with add'l 40GB
ext storage/NTSC monitor, etc.
Canopus DV Products
The Canopus web site
lists the various editing products available as well as the helpful
DVRaptor Users Group.
Subject: Canopus DV-Rex Capture board Date: Thu, 31 Dec 1998 01:56:43 -0500
I read your TRV900 FAQ with great interest. I recently purchased a TRV900 and am very happy with it. Since you are interested in hearing from people who use it with a DV capture board, I thought I would tell you about my experience so far.
Before buying the camera and the capture board I researched both extensively. I settled on the Canopus DV-Rex M1 product. I have it installed on a Dell Dimension P2 450 with a Medea 17 Gig RAID drive. I couldn't be happier with the TRV and Canopus combination. The Canopus kit is a solid and robust product with an excellent software bundle, and because of the on-board Sony Hardware CODEC the performance is awesome.
The only thing that I am having a problem with is the Medea drive. Apparently, there is an incompatibility wiith the Intel 440 chip set and the Medea drive. The work-around is to install a Medea IDE controller. The problem with this is that the Dell came with only ONE free PCI slot (shame on you Dell) which, of course, is used up by the Canopus board. Medea suggested that I uncheck DMA for the Medea drive and set the BIOS PCI latency timer to 32. Unfortunately, I've yet to find where this latency timer is set. I have a call in to Medea but they seem to be out for the holidays. If anyone knows where I can find the PCI latency timer I would appreciate the info.
I hope this information comes in handy for anyone considering the Canopus/Intel 440/Medea combination, particularly the need for an additional PCI slot to install the Medea IDE controller. Fortunately everything works fine with the superfast 9 gig drive that came with the Dell, so at least I've been able to continue my work (CD ROM development). But I am eager to get that Medea drive working.
Keep up the good work,
Jorge Torres Miami, FL
Subject: Canopus DVRaptor works well From: "Ian C" (iancull at usa net) Date: Fri, 27 Aug 1999 22:21:19 -0400
I have admittedly bought a high end PC - PIII-550 with 256MB RAM and 2 17GB hard drives. However, from nearly two hours of raw footage (some from my old camcorder transferred to the TRV900) I have produced a 40minute video which I am quite pleased with for my first attempt. I worked in sections, keeping the final video below the AVI 9minute limit; in this way I kept all video on the hard drives until I was satisfied. I experienced almost zero crashes during my 3-4 weeks work, although I did meet the "famous" Adobe Premiere bugs where shifting the video does not move the rendered sections (generally only requiring a re-render, but sometimes leaving old ghost renders which force a complete wipe of the rendered data).
Overall though I have been pleased & impressed with the fact that NLE is now possible; fun even! By the way, a one second dissolve takes only about 4 seconds so although I was not working in realtime, it was not tedious.
I do think that you might be better to consider some big hard drives instead of the GVD300 - remember that writing video off to tape will force you to wait; leaving the data on disk gives no delay!
I just finished a long edit a few minutes ago and I wanted to emphasize how excellent the TRV900 and the DVRaptor work together. Seamless editing, cutting and dumping to the machine. Crystal clear video, functional timecode, and two excellent applications for scene generation and playback/dumping to avi. Premiere is very happy to work with the DVRaptor due to the plugin and I am completely pleased. --AlexSubject: [TRV900] DVRaptor, TRV900, and Premiere- they SING together! Date: Monday, September 20, 1999 12:15 AM From: Alex Swain (alex at careerbuilder com)
From: "Tom Harleman" (tharleman at iquest net)
Subject: TRV900 & DVRaptor NLE with MediaStudioPro 5.2 Date: Fri, 01 Oct 1999 01:26:14 -0700 From: Victor Khong (victor at victorfilmgroup com)Just finshed a 14 minute 10 second video album which consisted of old black and white photos shot with the TRV900 copystand style, 8mm film footage transfered to VHS NTSC video to miniDV using the TRV900 to dub.
The DVRaptor is installed on a PentiumII 350mghz, 128 megs ram, 2 X 9 gig IBM SCSI, ATI Pro Rage II 128 bit - 32 megs ram video card on a 17 inch monitor. I run the RCA out to a VHS VCR, from the VCR to a 13" TV monitor. The OS is Win98 OSR2.
The Raptor worked flawlessly with once freeze during one of the renders. I suspect this was my fault as I deleted some files from the \temp\ directory to make space on my harddrives.
Never once during editing, transitions, moving clips or anything else in editing did MediaStudioPro 5.2 (came with the Raptor) freeze on me. The stability of the software and drivers was FABULOUS!
Using Raptor Video I was able to capture everything without a single dropped frame. Using Raptor Navigator, I got the software to log all the ins and outs of the various photos which were recorded to tape. This generated a batch capture edit decision list. Then setting the software to batch capture, the Raptor logged and captured every single photo I had recorded on tape (over 100 photos\video clips)!
Once this was done, I just called it up in the production library of MSP 5.2 and then from there it was drag and drop onto the timeline, edit my ins and outs with frame freezes, set my dissolves, lay on the music tracks which were ripped from CD using CD Ripper and the video album was done!
I should add it took about 2 hours to render the 14:09 of finished video. I then output to tape using firewire back to the TRV900 and then from TRV900 back out to VHS.
What impressed me was:
1. Quality and stability of DVRaptor control over the TRV900. It was frame accurate, jog-able, captured without drop frame and STABLE.
2. MediaStudioPro 5.2 is an unsung hero of desktop video editing. Premiere has greater name recognition but is not as stable. MSP 5.2 is deadly in its ease of use, the multiple ways of doing something, *never* freezes on you, renders fine and I have been having my computer on using NLE for over 18 hours without rebooting and it still works!
Like many software users, I am not tapping into MSP's full potential - just what I need for my work. --Victor
I have recently got up and running with a Bravado DV2000 / Premiere 5.1 combination, and I'm fairly favourably impressed. Mind you, I'm now using it on a Celeron-A 450MHz with 384Mb RAM, which certainly helps (more detailed system information, which may be useful, follows later).From: "Giles Read" (Giles@read.net) Date: Sat, 3 Apr 1999 22:46:26 +0100
So far, I have used the system to edit a one-minute piece showing my cat falling off a roof, and a 30-minute programme of my local primary school's Christmas play. The latter took several evenings to edit, because I'm still learning Premiere, but I'm impressed with the professional-looking results. There are some 300 elements to the final cut, which includes about 30 transitions of typically 2 seconds each, plus a 20 second rolling title for the closing credits. When I deliberately deleted all the Preview files, the whole shooting-match took 1 hour 20 minutes to re-render. Most of the transitions and suchlike took under 2 minutes to render when I was doing the editing.
Handy household hint: if you go to Project/Settings/Keyframe and Rendering, you'll see an option "Preview to RAM". Rather than using a RAM disk to create preview files, it actually renders everything on-the-fly and displays your edited video in the Monitor window. On my machine it manages (I guess) 10-15 frames per second or so, unless it's doing a complicated transition, when the frame rate drops alarmingly. Still, it provides a very quick way to check your transitions and titles are roughly what you expect, before investing the time in a proper Preview.
Bugs. There do still seem to be a few problems with Premiere. Although I have only had one total crash, there have been a few odd things happening, such as rendering (usually Print to Video) coming to an abrupt halt, complaining that it cannot find the file named "" (i.e. no name). I also sometimes get garbage frames in the middle of a rendered section, for instance a frame or two of something from elsewhere in the film suddenly appearing in the middle of a transition. Also - I suspect a hardware problem - the image on the '900 screen (and attached monitor) occasionally breaks up for no readily apparent reason. This usually happens when the image is 'resting', i.e. the display is showing the last frame of video it was sent some while ago and I'm doing something else (or nothing at all) in Premiere.
Sample pictures. I mentioned that I'm a new Dad: primarily for the benefit of family and friends, I have a primitive web site (www.giles.read.net) which contains a number of photos of my new daughter. I mention this purely because the pictures are all taken from the TRV-900. Many of them were taken in poor lighting conditions, so they're rather grainy, although some are reasonable. (When you get to the bit about the cat, don't bother downloading the video: it's terrible quality due to the fact that I've had to compress it a *lot* to make it economically viable for us impecunious English to download. We have to pay for our local phone calls, you see).
Initially, I started using the DV2000 under Win 95 with a Pentium 233mmx, 64Mb RAM and two 13.5Gb 5400 RPM IBM UDMA-66 HDD's (plus a mongrel C: drive), running on a Chaintech 5SIM motherboard. I was seriously unimpressed with the performance, with it taking up to several seconds for the user interface to catch up with me (e.g. switching between the Timeline and Monitor windows). I also had some problems with MotoDV capture: when I followed the Radius instructions to enable DMA to the hard disks, the date transfer rate dropped to just a few hundred Kbyte per second!
(Handy household hint: how to check your sustained data transfer rate if you've got more than one drive. Make a *big* (500Mb) file somehow - try for instance ZIPping your Windows CD. Run System Monitor (which you may have to install from the Windows CD) and make sure that you've got Bytes Read Per Second showing. Copy the file from one HDD to another, and keep an eye on the BRPS figure. Hey presto: that's your sustained data transfer rate.) My IBM drives, which are just slapped in on the same UDMA-66 cable and not RAID'ed or anything, sustain about 5-6Mb per second without any trouble.
Back to the DV2k. I decided that there was no way that the P233 was going to be adequate for the task of desktop video, even though it would quite happily capture and write DV with no dropped frames (processor loading was about 80%). I read an interesting article at www.tomshardware.com describing how to make a 300MHz Celeron-A (66MHz bus) run at 450MHz (100MHz bus) using nothing more than a piece of insulating tape (the Celeron-A processor core and cache RAM is rated OK to 450MHz). So I got a Celeron-A 300 and a new motherboard, and used the money I saved on the Celeron vs a PII-450 to buy all that lovely RAM (and a decent graphics card - now, Unreal *rocks* at 1024x768 :-> ). The result is a damn fast machine at a rock bottom price.
I ran into some problems getting the machine to run under Win 95 (OSR1 doesn't support USB or AGP), so I changed to Win 98, which seems to run OK (but I don't like the "improvements" to the user interface).
For a while, I ran the machine with "only" 256Mb of RAM. I didn't notice any performance improvement when I added the extra 128Mb. I have a feeling that an optimum machine for Premiere would be about four big, fast Xeon's running NT.
Hope this is useful (or at least interesting),
Giles.
A warning you might want to post is to avoid buying one of the new Blue and White G3 Macs. It is being advertised as being able to do DV editing with its built-in firewire. But the bad news is that Apple's firewire driver does not work with most newer Sony DV cameras, including the TRV-900. Very few sales people/apple techs know about this. Sony apparently changed the timing on its newer models, and Apple has just been made aware of this by countless angry TRV-900 owners who bought a new mac just for digital video editing. No word has been given as to when the driver will be updated. But more TRV-900 videographers who wasted their money on a new mac are complaining on the mac tech board every day. So I'm not buying a mac till this gets fixed. This is a big issue because it involves all new macs since the firewire is now built- in on all models(except the imac). I'll let you know when the driver gets updated.
-Eric C
