Videoguy looks at the future
Hopefully by the time you read this article, all or most of the products mentioned will be shipping. I have to admit it, I’m a little nervous. None of the products mentioned in this article were available for me to actually use, so all the features and performance specs are from press releases, preliminary spec sheets and my own high level contacts within the industry. I feel that the information I am about to provide you will be very accurate, but manufacturers have been known to make last minute changes or delay products indefinitely.
I plan on reviewing all the sneak peak products in the future when I actually have shipping versions in my hands. So, now that I’ve let you in on where the information comes from, lets go on a ride into the future of desk top video!!
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DPS just missed getting me an EditBay in time for this review, but final release was imminent. The hardware is actually the latest design form Quadrant, the makers of the top rated Q-Motion cards. The old Truevision Bravado was actually the Q-Motion 200 card, so I guess you could call the EditBay the Q-Motion 300. The EditBay boasts of excellent specs such as 7 megs/sec throughput and 720x480 frame size, that put it on an even playing field with the existing industry leader, the Pinnacle miroDC30plus. But it’s not the hardware alone that makes this a very exciting product, but the incredibly tight integration of the entire EditBay bundle.
Here’s a little history for you. DPS purchased Star Media Systems, the maker of Video Action Pro software this past summer. DPS management knew that Video Action Pro was a winner, because a customized version for their industrial strength Perception NLE system has been a hot seller for over a year.
One of the main objectives of the Star Media acquisition was to have a fully integrated software bundle for their award winning Spark FireWire capture card and future affordable capture cards. EditBay is the first NLE system for under $1000 with a single source for all tech support and development. EditBay owners won’t have to worry about spending frustrating hours with tech support to be told that "It’s not our fault, it’s the software!" (or vice versa). My inside sources tell me that a work around for the 2GB video for windows file system will be built into Video Action, although the initial shipping version may not include this feature. DPS has assured me that when it becomes available, all EditBay users will be offered a free upgrade program. I like Video Action for another reason, it has filters, effects and features that are simply awesome. I’ve been a regular user and big fan of the PowerSurge plug-in software for Premiere. Well, most of the effects are built into the EditBay Video Action Pro bundle. So not only do you get a top rated card and a full featured, tightly integrated NLE software, but the wiz bang effects of a $500 plug-in!! With a street price of around $800, this makes DPS and EditBay a very serious player in the under $1000 NLE market.
Status: Now shipping
The DV300 is miro’s second generation DV product. Unfortunately miro bet on the wrong horse in the initial FireWire hardware race. They went with a company called Skipstone’s hardware and licensed the software DV CODEC (compression method) from Sony. Shortly before the DV100 was scheduled for release, Adaptec purchased Skipstone. The resulting merger left miro with a crippled product, that was not capable of output. Since then miro itself has been purchased by Pinnacle Systems. This time around the DV300 is the best of both worlds. It uses the already established AHA2940 hardware from Adaptec plus the already licensed Sony CODEC. The result is the first product that promises to deliver on the full capabilities of FireWire. The DV300 combines the incredible quality of DV editing with the sophisticated deck control FireWire offers. The miro DVTools software lets you create a complete edit decision list before you capture any video. This way you only capture the video footage you need for your final production. At 3.6 megs per second, saving just 10 seconds worth of bad video from each scene in a 30 scene project would result in over a gigabyte of saved space!! Even better, Pinnacle has added the miroINSTANT video technology to the DV300, so you can play up to 1 hour of DV footage directly from the Premiere timeline. Not only does this save a tremendous amount of disk space because only the transitions/filters/effects are rendered into new files, but it busts through the 2 GB file limitation of video for windows. The DV300 can also be used in the same system as a DC30 or DC30plus so you can integrate your existing analog footage into your new DV projects.
Best off all, the DV300 will have drivers for multiple platforms : Win95, Win NT, and Mac OS PLUS both TV standards, NTSC and PAL.
Status: January 98 Using Adaptec 8945 hardware
Truevision renters the under $1000 capture card market with the Bravado 2000. The B2K uses the same Zoran chip set as the miro DC30plus and DPS EditBay, so I expect to get the same great performance. Initial specs from Truevision show slightly lower top data rate of 6 megs per second. I use a top data rate of 4 megs per second on my projects, I feel that anything higher is a waste of disk space. Neither myself or my audience can see the difference on 95% of my clips. The B2K does have a very cool feature that I suspect will become the industry standard for all new capture cards: A Breakout Box. As a digital videographer with multiple camcorders and VCRs, this is a very big convenience. I won’t have to crawl under my computer desk with a flashlight anymore to change from my Hi8 to SVHS camcorder. Even more important, the breakout box and shielded cable will remove any RF/ electrical interference. With so many cables stuffed behind a DTV computer, you can run into signal problems caused by the rats nest of all those cables. So as you can see, the breakout Box isn’t a clever marketing gimmick, but a real benefit to the digital videographer. Thank you Truevision for bringing a feature previously only found on commercial non linear editing systems to home videographers. The Bravado 2000 ships with the Full version of Adobe Premiere. With an expected street price of around $900, combined with Truevision’s outstanding toll free tech support, it should be a winner.
Status: January 98
Adaptec AHA8945
You may not know it, but Adaptec dominates the FireWire industry. Their AHA8940 card is used by DPS as the Spark and by Pinnacle as the DV300. Most folks know Adaptec as the SCSI controller guys. And for digital video, the Adaptec AHA2940UW is my top recommendation for SCSI controller. Well, guess what you get when you combine the top SCSI controller card and the industries leading FireWire board into a single PCI bus mastering plug & play device? You guessed it, the AHA8945. As of this writing none of Adaptec’s OEM partners had added the 8945 to their product mix, so Adaptec will be offering it to the public directly as a complete IEEE1394 solution. It’ll cost close to a thousand dollars, and it won’t come with any video editing software, but it will include the DV Soft drivers for video capture, playback and deck control. I suspect that both Pinnacle and DPS will offer this card in the future, once they have firmly established their 8940 based cards in the marketplace.
Status: January 98, Most OEMs switching from 8940 to 8945
Media 100 for PC
It’s been rumored for over a year, and finally the top selling, top rated media 100 system is migrating to the Windows platform. Media 100 has dominated the professional Mac based side of the DTV market. Over the past year they have introduced lower cost Mac offerings, and the Media 100 QX can now be found for under $2000. I hope that the new PC product will be this affordable, but even if it is only the high end initially, it will be more affordable in a year or two. I can hardly wait!!
Status: May 98
If you think prices on video capture cards have fallen while performance has skyrocketed, wait until you here about all the amazing new progress in storage!!
Seagate, Quantum and several other top hard drive manufacturers have released specs on the next generation of SCSI. Called SCSI3, it provides even higher data transfer rates and more storage!! !! I expect 18 GB SCSI3 drives to be available by the time this article is printed. My sources tell me to expect real sustained throughputs approaching 15 megs per second! Best of all, the new generation of drives has driven down prices of existing Ultra and UltraWide SCSI drives.
Another major development in storage technology is EIDE RAID systems. In the past the only way possible to create a RAID was with SCSI drives and an expensive controller card. EIDE RAIDs provide outstanding performance by ‘striping’ two or four drives together to create a single drive that is much faster and equal in storage to the sum of all drives used. A RAID using two 6.4 GB drives looks like 1 huge 12.8 GB drive to your system. Two companies now offer EIDE RAID solutions with more coming soon. Promise lets you create your own RAID using there very affordable (under $150) FastTrack controller card. It supports the latest Ultra DMA drive technology. How fast is it? Well if the two 6.4GB drives mentioned earlier are Ultra DMA, sustained throughputs of over 15 megs are a piece of cake!!
Medea has taken an even easier approach. They have pre-configured units called videoRAIDs. These self contained digital video storage solutions include a RAID controller sandwiched between two matching drives. All you have to do is mount the VideoRAID inside your tower and plug it into your existing EIDE controller. Total install takes under 5 minutes and provides sustained throughputs of 10 megs per second. Medea should now be offering Ultra DMA VideoRAIDs with 15+ megs/sec throughputs!!
USB, the next great interface?
USB stands for Universal Serial Bus. This new technology, being hyped by Microsoft, Intel and all the big computer makers lets you daisy chain multiple devices externally to your computer. It is supposed to be 100% plug & play and self detecting. Some of you may not even know it, but you have 1 or more USB jacks on your computer already!! It looks like an S-Video jack and it is included on almost all the latest Pentium II motherboards. Why is this technology important to videographers? Because it is significantly faster then serial or parallel ports. As a result, it is possible to create a USB ‘black box’ that could have a video capture card built into it. This means that future digital videographers may not have to install any boards at all, and IRQ conflicts will be a thing of the past. USB video capture devices are under development, but unfortuantley, you may never get to see any. USB is a technology frozen in a chicken or the egg situation. While new PCs have the jack, no one seems to be in any rush to deliver USB peripherals. The USB bus was designed for keyboards, mice, printers and monitors, not digital video. It is with these low tech devices that the technology must get tested, proven and adapted before it can be ‘super charged’ for digital video. As I write this article, it is uncertain whether USB can reach a big enough critical mass for it to be adopted as a widespread industry. I hope that it does. My advice to you is that if you are buying a new PC and you are given the option to get USB jacks, DO IT!!
Gary Bettan
videoguy@videoguys.com