Looking to edit videos with your computer? Steve McDonald (bigr...@webtv.net) recommends the following solution for high-quality results at a low-budget price.
If you already have a good video-friendly computer system on hand, says Steve, and you want to incorporate some NLE (non-linear editing) into this, then expect your total cost to be somewhat higher. If your budget is fairly limited and the end product is the main or only goal, he suggests using only videotape editing and duplication, following this formula:
Buy two JVC S-VHS HR-S9500 VCRs, at $500 each and a Sony DCR-TRV510 Digital8 camcorder, for about $1200, from a good mail-order dealer. The 510 camcorder, he notes, has analog inputs and outputs and can send a time-base corrected S-Video analog signal into one of the VCRs for editing on S-VHS. You could show this 2nd generation tape directly to students or you could make 3rd generation copies on standard VHS tapes on the other S-VHS VCR. The VCRs also have digital time-base correctors (TBCs), so the loss of quality in making the 2nd and 3rd generation recordings would be minimized. The JVC 9500 was tested at 260 lines of resolution in the standard VHS recording mode, which is 20-30 lines better than almost all other VHS recorders.
Says McDonald, "I believe that your VHS distribution copies would be very good and viewable, if you have good original camera recordings with which to work. If your budget is a bit higher, you could go with a Sony DCR-TRV900 DV camcorder, which will deliver a higher-resolution image than the Digital8 model and somewhat better color. Using the TRV900 would raise your total costs from about $2200. to $3200., not counting shipping and extra batteries and tapes. Since your final recordings will mostly be put on standard VHS, I doubt if you'd see much difference from the original camera input between the 3-CCD TRV900 and the single-CCD TRV510. You could also add a DV VCR to make your 2nd gen. edits, but that would add another $2000. to $3500. to the cost. You'd have to have a DV camcorder to use a DV VCR, as the Digital8 tapes wouldn't play back in it. There is no Digital8 VCR model at present, so you'd need to use the TRV510 to play back the camera tapes. There is a rumor that a Digital8 VCR may appear in the future, for about $800, but this is unconfirmed. JVC 9500 VCRs will give excellent slow-motion and freeze-frame performance. I recommend using Fuji H-471s S-VHS Professional videotape for best results and Fuji Extra Highgrade VHS tapes.
McDonald says this system would be very simple to put together and use and the results would be dependable. He also notes that, if a computer-based editing system is your goal, you'll need some good advice on putting it together and getting it up and running. However, he says, "I don't want to discourage you from going this route, if your budget and circumstances allow it."
Going all digital:
Apple, Compaq, Matsushita, Philips, Sony and Toshiba in Feb. 1999 jointly announced plans to form a so-called "patent pool," putting an end to Apple's controversial plan to charge a $1 per port licensing fee for the IEEE1394 FireWire technology it developed.
The companies announced their support of the high-speed IEEE1394 digital interface and their intention to form a patent pool to efficiently license patents required to implement the standard. The six companies will work together to create a joint licensing program and promote the industry-wide adoption of IEEE1394.
IEEE1394 was invented by Apple and was adopted by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) as an industry standard in 1995. Offering data transfer rates up to 400 megabits per second, IEEE1394 has become the standard for transferring digital video, and over three million digital camcorders with built-in IEEE1394 have been sold to date. IEEE1394 is being incorporated into an ever-increasing array of consumer multimedia devices, such as set-top boxes and digital VCRs, and is poised to become the next generation industry standard for connecting personal computers to high-speed peripherals such as printers, scanners and disk drives.
The DV Guide Head-To-Head interactive comparison system allows you to compare different capture cards. You'll get side-by-side technical comparisons, requirements and hands-on reviews for most cards. The URL is: http://dvguide.sharbor.com/head-to-head/
When capturing digital video, the issue of hard drive performance becomes important. In the old days, it was a no-brainer. You needed a SCSI drive, and an expensive AV one, at that. But today, virtually all drives avoid the thermal recalibration problems that plagued last-generation drives, and high-performance Ultra DMA drives are closer than ever to providing the throughput that SCSI delivers. So, is IDE a viable option?
Yes, although there is still an advantage to Ultra SCSI at the high end. The best bet if you want to save money is to go with an IDE "RAID" adapter such as the Promise Fastrack, Iwill SIDE-RAID66, or similar units. RAID, which stands for "redundant array of independent drives" (some definitions substitute the word "inexpensive") allows you to combine several hard drives as if they were one super high-performance unit; with a suitable RAID controller, you can combine several IDE drives, yielding 11-12 mbps read/write in a typical eight-way configuration. This is more than adequate to handle the non-linear video editing most videographers will want to do with digital FireWire capture cards or FireWire-equipped digital video cameras. Fans of these IDE RAID systems say there are few if any valid reasons to pay twice the price for SCSI drives anymore, given the state of current IDE UDMA technology.
We've read consistently good reports about the recent IBM UDMA and Maxtor UDMA drives, now available in capacities up to 80GB. Users report being able to capture and output DV video without dropping frames even when not RAIDed. Our own experiences with Maxtor units is consistent with these findings, and a test of the Seagate Barracuda ATA/66 vs. FireWire drives demonstrates that UDMA/66 drives are a viable alternative to SCSI or FireWire-based solutions.
However, according to Gary Bettan (vide...@concentric.net), the inner 20% of many UDMA drives are likely to cause problems for DV compressed video. But, he says, the problem may be just a few frames dropped and hardly noticeable. The following stats are based on the outer 80% of an UDMA drive. For videos up to 10 minutes long, UDMA drives are fantastic for DV editing. Up to 15 minutes is usually no problem at all, but some frames may drop. 15-20 minutes is the yellow zone. This is where many users report some dropped frames. But still, this is not unusable video, just a few frames. At over 20 minutes most users will find they drop some frames. But once again, the video is useable, just some slight playback problems. Where you run into problems, Bettan admits, is if you have a video over 10 minutes long on an UDMA drive that is over 80% full. At that point playback problems may make the video unusable.
Looking for a laptop computer on which to edit (moving) shots from a mini DV video camera? Sony's new VAIO laptops feature an iLink port (Firewire) and weigh less than 3 pounds.
In a desktop PC, you have many more choices, of course. If you haven't yet purchased a computer and want to go "Wintel," we'd recommend a PIII instead of a PII. A good choice is Sony's VAIO Digital Studio PC, which is optimized for video and comes pre-equipped with FireWire I/O, DVD-ROM and CDRW drives.
If cost is the issue then go for a 400-466MHz Celeron it will perform roughly the same as a similar PII. Once the codecs (compressors/decompressors) are updated to take advantage of the the Pentium III's Streaming SIMD Extensions (a group of new instructions designed to speed video processing and 3D graphics), the PIII should start to demonstrate a marked advantage over earlier Intel processors, leading to dramatically accelerated rendering.
A very popular FireWire solution is the Digital Origin MotoDV Studio 2.0 (formerly from Radius) - it includes everything you need to get started: Premiere 5.1 editing software, FireWire card, cable, and a lot more! Complete details can be found at: http://www.sharbor.com/products/RISI5010001.html. The Digital Origin MotoDV Studio 2.0 retails for US$675. Some users, however, note that the tech support people tend to be Mac-centric, and don't seem to know much about PCs.
Final Cut Pro BoxA bit higher in price is the Canopus DVRaptor. Combined with a Sony DVMC-DA1 Media Converter, it costs about US$1000 total and gives you both DV and analog capture, with all the editing done in DV. Most users agree that the Raptor is the best 'native' PC solution in its price-range. Its advanced bus-mastering & MMX integration translate into faster rendering than with competing products. The caveat is that editing can only be done full screen via FireWire and the card's specialized analog I/O. The Raptor is bundled with Ulead's Media Studio Pro -- one of our favorite video editors.
Also in this price range is the Pinnacle DV300, which ships with Premiere 5.1 -- our other favorite editor. It includes FireWire and SCSI-3, but lacks analog I/O. The general consensus is that this system is a little more trouble to set up and maintain, but generally works well. It's also worth mentioning that, DV300 requires version 1.6 or newer drivers to be compatible with Sony's popular TRV900 and Video Walkman units.
Further up the performance ladder, the US$2200 Canopus DVRex-M1 has FireWire (DV) connections as well as composite and S-Video capabilities. It recently won "Best Capture Card" from VideoMaker magazine -- it's a great card. Check out all the details at www.canopus.com
And then there's Mac. A number of Apple's recent iMac and G3/G4 desktop models include FireWire, and all Apple computers ship with iMovie 2, the company's east-to-use, low-end movie-editing software. It, like the the company's US$999 Final Cut Pro editing software, lets you plug a FireWire-compatible DV camera into the computer and immediately capture, edit, and enhance the incoming digital video.
See our Mac hardware section for more details on DV options for the Mac.
Looking for Character Generation (CG) software for producing title sequences? Download a 30 day fully functional trial version of Power CG, from cayman graphics at http://www.aros.net/~cayman/.
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