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If the DC1000 sounds to good to be true, then you are going to be in for a major surprise. The out of box experience with the DC1000 was the best I have ever had for a new product. And the DC1000 is much more then just a new video capture card. It is the first product in a video editing revolution that will transform the industry and give you, the digital videographer, more power, more features, and more options then you ever thought you could afford. I must apologize, but it is very hard for me to not be overly enthusiastic about this card. It really is that good. And we guarantee it! We offer a 30 day satisfaction guarantee on all our DTV products, so if you think this article is all hype, I dare you to prove me wrong!
Since I mentioned compression, now would be a good time to explain the DC1000 compression settings. In the MJPEG and DV editing world we are used to using Megs/sec, were a meg is equal to 1,000 kbytes of data. DV footage uses 3.6 megs/sec, which yields 4.5 minutes of native DV footage per GB. The same quality footage captured via MJPEG requires a data rate of 4.5 – 5 megs per second and yields 3.5 minutes per GB. MPEG2 is measured in megabits per second, and there are 8 bits in a byte. So when we say the DC1000 has a maximum datarate of 25 megabits per second, that equates to 3.125 Megs/second. Let me tell you something. I had a hard time telling any difference between MPEG2 footage at 25, 16 or as low as 12 megabits per second. That is because MPEG2 is a low loss compression. With MJPEG the more you compress, the worse the video looks. At under 2 Megs per second you don't even have VHS quality. With MPEG2 compression at 10 megabits (1.25 Megs/sec) the video quality is still outstanding. That means that you can get over 15 minutes per GB of hi res video, as good as home SVHS quality!.
If you've been following the industry and new products for the past year, then you know that the big buzzword is real time effects. That means that when you are editing, these effects do not need to be rendered. They play back instantly from the timeline, both in preview and for final output. Before the DC1000 you were going to shell out well over $5 grand for a real time system, and these systems required SCSI RAID storage capable of sustaining 30+ Megs/sec sustained throughput! So a complete dual stream system with storage could set you back $10- $15,000. That's what makes the DC1000 truly amazing. Thanks to the very efficient MPEG2 compression, all you need is 10 Megs/sec throughput and you can edit in real time!! This is easily achieved with a single UW SCSI drive or a Medea VideoRAID or Promise FastTrack. I did try to edit dual stream with a single DMA EIDE drive, and while I could capture and playback perfect video, while I was editing I could tell I was pushing the drive to its limits. At the point that the drive was 2/3rds full, I was no longer able to edit dual stream and Premiere was getting very sluggish.
The DC1000 includes 17 real time transitions. These transitions can be modified for even more effects. But what really makes the real time effects powerful is Pinnacles inclusion of the Pixelan Video SpiceRack transitions. Choosing the Pinnacle Gradient wipe and then opening the SpiceRack folder at the bottom of the window can access about 200 of these effects. I have been a big fan of the SpiceRack for a while. All the Spices are real time. In addition if you upgrade to the new SpiceRack Pro and Organix bundle you get over 700 total effects, all processed in real time.
You also get three real time filters, brightness, saturation and invert. You can also do superimposition in real time. You can superimpose a bitmap, title or another DC1000 video clip on top of another DC1000 clip in real time. I found the alpha keying to be very sharp with no halos or artifacts. Tech Tip: The first time you create a TitleDeko tile it will not default to transparent. You have to select the Title from the timeline, and right click on it. Select video then transparency from the pull down window. Once inside the transparency window you can select the alpha key setting you feel works best. From that point forward all future TitleDeko titles in the project will be transparent.
Of course, you can use all the other features and capabilities of Premiere and whatever other plug-ins you may own, you'll just have to render them out. The DC1000 includes the miroINSTANT video playback utility which gives you smart rendering. So once you render out a preview for a non real time portion of your video, it saves it. As long as you don't change it or any clips before it, you will not have to render it again. Another nice feature of the DC1000 is that the INSTANT video logo is more then just a scenery. When the band at the bottom is green it means your project will play back real time, if the band turns red, then you have to render. A very neat indicator that can save you lots of aggravation the night before a deadline.
Overall I found the Premiere RT to be a pleasure to work with. It was rock solid and stable. Even when I created effects and transitions that needed rendering, they were completed quite fast. I found that a 5 second Boris FX transition that normally takes several minutes with a DV card, rendered in about a minute and a half. Of course the speed and memory of your PC will give you different results, but since the MPEG2 footage requires 50% less data, it makes sense that rendering should be 50% faster!
You can click here to download a screen capture of one of my projects
The DC1000 supports a new video standard called OpenDML AVI 1.1. This means that you can capture, edit and create avi files up to 12 terabytes in size! To utilize this new feature you must select the Pinnacle AVI MPEG2 compressor. Premiere RT can fully utilize these files but not all video editing and production software can. So for this reason you still can select to use the old AVI 1.0 standard with its very annoying 2GB file limit. When you combine the efficiency of the MPEG2 compression with this new AVI standard, it makes the DC1000 a great choice for long format productions like weddings, documentaries and even features. The versatility of the DC1000 is simply amazing.
When you export your video you can either play it directly from the timeline out to tape, save it as an AVI file or you can export it as MPEG2. When you do this you actually export both an MP2 video only clip (MPEG2 ML@MP elementary stream) and a seperate WAV audio file. This is designed specifically for DVD/MPEG2-CD authoring software. You get a choice of two MPEG2 export options either fixed DVD quality or Minerva Impressions CD preset.
The feature of the DC1000 that puts it over the edge and really shows how Pinnacle is pushing the technology envelope is the integration with Minerva Impression CD Pro. In your export options you can choose to output for Minerva. Not only do you get pre-formatted clips, but you can set up Impressions to open automatically when Premiere is done. Even more amazing, you can set unnumbered markers throughout your Premiere timeline. When the project opens in Impressions, each of these markers automatically becomes a new chapter!! What's so great about that? Well each new chapter can be dragged and dropped onto a button and in an instant you've got an interactive CD ROM!! You can also select if each clip should play into the next one or go back to the menu. You get 4 different menus and button sets that you can use with Impressions. But you won't use them beyond your first project. The Impressions software lets you import a PhotoShop file directly into it to use as your menu. You can assign each button to a PhotoShop layer. You can also pull out a thumbnail of the first frame of each chapter to be used as a button. When you are done with your project you can save it on your hard d rive in a folder as the CD image. This way you can open it up and see that it is exactly what you want before you burn it to CD. Then, once you are sure you've got it exactly right, Impressions will burn it directly to your CD recorder/ re-writer. Best off all, it puts a self executing MPEG2 player on the CD so anyone with an MMX equipped PC with 8x or faster CD ROM can play it!
About my system
The DC1000 only runs on Windows NT 4.0. Win98 drivers should be available early 4th quarter and Win2000 drivers will be ready shortly after. That said, I've always been a Win 95/98 guy. The DC1000 was my first ever experience with NT. Now that I've tried it, I'll never go back (although I am looking forward to Windows2000). NT is more stable and NT is faster and NT is better. BUT, if you are going to run NT, you need to give it all the power it needs. That means setting up or buying an NT workstation, not just putting NT on your existing Win 98 machine. If you are going to make the jump to NT, do it right. If you follow my advice, you will not only save money, but tons of potential aggravation and hours on tech support. I did a lot of research before I got my NT box. I looked at white box units, the latest offerings from the big three direct marketers (Dell, Micron & Gateway) as well as talking to my local integrators about IBM, HP and Compaq workstations. What I decided on was a Dell Precision 210 workstation, with PIII 500, 128 megs RAM, 13GB EIDE drive, Diamond Viper 770, 4x2x20x Sony CDR-W, NT4.0 service pack 3.I chose to get an UDMA EIDE drive for the OS and to test if it was up to the task of dual stream, real time NLE. Based on my findings and experimenting with NT, I strongly recommend a dedicated drive for the video. I am using an Medea VideoRAID 2/50 SCSI hooked up to an Adaptec 2940UW controller.
Here are a few tips I learned from working with NT:
- Given a properly configured workstation like the Precision 210, PCI devices will have no problem sharing resources. With NT when IRQs are shared you get a virtual IRQ assigned to each device. In this snapshot of my systems IRQs you can see DC1000 is listed as lstone ( the code name given the DC1000 while under development was limestone) on IRQ 64. It is listed twice because I'm running the DV module as well. The nv4 is my Diamond Viper card. I tried experimenting with different drivers for the card. The Diamond driver was a bit quirky and it installed the card with no IRQ assigned to it. I settled on the NVIDIA OEM drivers Dell provided. I'm running at 1280 x 1024, truecolor resolution. This gives me a lot of real estate for Premiere! I'll check each new Viper driver as it gets released. The driver I'm running only supports Primary overlay. I don't find this a problem, but surface overlay puts less of a burden on the CPU. I have a network adapter installed so I can connect to the net via my cable modem.
- If you have the Intel 820 chipset, the DC1000 hardware needs to be in the first PCI slot. That is the slot closest to the AGP slot. This will probably cause the DC1000 to share an IRQ with your graphics card. This should be OK.
- Do not run the Iomega Jazz or Zip tools. They are a disaster. They disabled EIDE bus mnastering and they slowed down all my disk drives. Just run the latest atapi drivers from service pack 4, they will find and control your Zip drive.
- Do not use the SCSI drivers for the Adpatec 2940 that NT has in it's database. They are terrible. Download the NT driver for the 2940UW here.
- I am running service pack 4. I have not yet tried pack 5 and I do not know if I will. But I did find out something very helpful from Dell tech support. After you make any hardware changes in your system, reload the service pack. That makes sure that if any drivers got corrupted, you won't be effected. While the service pack is loading, if you get told that a newer version of a driver was found on the system, be very cautious before you let the service pack over-write it. I made a shortcut on my desktop to the update.exe file on the SP4 disk. Now whenever I need to update I just load the disk and click.
- Partition wisely. A partition in time, saves time! I have a 2GB FAT16 partition for my operating system. I then have a second 2 GB NTFS partition for all my software, programs, documents, data etc.. The remainder of the drive is an NTFS partition for video clips. The reason for putting all your programs and data on a second partition is simple. If all hell breaks loose and you totally screw up your NT installation, you can just re-install NT in the Fat 16 partition. No data will be lost. You just reinstall the programs after your NT is back up and running
- If you do totally corrupt your NT system, reinstall NT in a new directory. Call it winnt2. This way you will not destroy any of your data, user settings or vendor supplied software. After you get the new install of NT up and running in the new directory you can copy any needed files. After a few days, you can just delete the old winnt directory.
- My Precision workstation came with a small utility that let me make floppy drives of several key install drivers and utilities. If your system comes with this feature, MAKE THE FLOPPIES!! This is not a request, it is an order. Believe me, someday you'll thank me for this one.
- Get a workstation.
It may cost a few hundred more, but if you can afford the DC1000 you can afford the extra investment. Workstations are designed specifically to run NT and CPU/ data intensive applications like video & image editing, CAD/CAM and animation. They have much more cooling and air circulation. They have reinforced drive bays and shielded cable connectors. They have bigger power supplies and they run ECC error correcting memory. They have motherboards that are designed for NT, so they either share resources beautifully, or they let you assign IRQs by PCI slot. If you treat the workstation as an investment you will reap the rewards. And I can't think of a better investment then a Dell Precision workstation.
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