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Spark for Win95 - Videoguy’s hands on 1st lookWell I just downloaded the new 1.01 driver from the DPS website and installed the Spark on my old clunker (P133, 32 megs RAM, 2 meg Diamond Stealth 3D, StreamLogic AV SCSI drive).WOW!!!!I have never seen such incredible quality video. Zero frames dropped, real time video capture and playback, stereo sound and, did I mention the incredible video quality!! |
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Win95 detected the Spark perfectly. The problem was finding the drivers for it. The read me didn’t say to run the set up before installing the card. You have to. The driver files do not exist until you run the set up program. So I ran set up and told Win95 I had the disk. Problem was, the files didn’t install in the Spark directory, but in Windows/System. I did a find file search on *1394.* and found them. Now I tried to add hardware again and everything took just fine. I tried running the Spark player/recorder software. It didn’t work, it showed no device installed. A quick check in device manager showed it was there. I was puzzled for about 3 minutes when it occurred to me. FireWire is an active bi-directional link. I had to plug in my VX700 and set it into VTR mode. I rebooted my computer and now everything was working!!
DV and me
Before today I had never used a DV camcorder. I heard all the hype, but I never got to actually use one. We bought a VX700 last month so we could check out the new DV cards, but Phil never let me use it. He kept raving about the video quality, but all I ever got to see were VHS dubs. When DPS announced the Win95 drivers for Spark are now available for FREE download, I took possession of the DV cam. Let me tell you folks, SVHS is dead and BetaCam is in the sights. The video quality is simply incredible. It’s the depth and brilliance of the colors that is so amazing. With S-VHS/Hi8 whatever was in the foreground looked great, but the background images were not as crisp. With DV, it’s like being there. I watched some footage on a 35 inch JVC SVHS monitor. AWESOME!! It looked as good as the laser discs Phil raves about. I could not wait to get my Spark up and going.Spark install
Installing the Spark under Win95 took me a little bit of time. The Win95 install directions were in the read me notes, and not very detailed. I am now going to expand on the directions so those of you reading this can get up and going quicker. If you have NT, skip to the next section.Here we go!!
My first capture was a 5 second clip to my SCSI drive. Spark gave me 4 choices for video playback on my computer monitor. I found that 180x 120 worked best. Still too small, but smooth. At 360x240 the image was bigger, but playback skipped. I now knew the Spark was working, but I could not really tell how good the picture was. I decided to see how it looked on the video monitor. Well, getting video out to the monitor was tricky at first, but I figured it out. You go back through the FireWire to the camcorder, then from the camcorder out to the video monitor via S-Video or composite. But, before you play the clip, you have to click on the little video monitor button on the Spark interface. If you try to select video after you play a clip to the monitor, you get nothing. Once I ironed out these speed bumps along the FireWire highway, I was ready to see the video. INCREDIBLE!!! As far as I could tell (or my wife) it was exactly the same as the original video. The sound was great too. I then recorded a 30 second clip. The video was just as good as the short clip. The only problem was that once in a while the computer and the DV cam would loose communication and I would have to reboot to keep going. Very annoying, but something I am sure will be worked out in future driver updates.
Editing
I tested the Spark using the Adobe Premiere I already had loaded on my system from my miro DC30. I imported the 30 second clip and started doing some editing. I added a few effects and transitions plus a title. I found the rendering to be about 2-3 times longer then the DC30 took for a similar project. I thought this was too long, so I did a little experiment. I captured about the same footage with the DC30 (yes it was still working great in the same system!!). As I was about to capture, I realized something. I was working in 640x480 with the DC30, but the Spark uses 720x480. So I chose the CCIR setting of 704x480. (Note: I found that the video looked a lot better using the VX700 as the source (S-Video output) then my older Hi8 cam. At 5:1 compression the video looked really good. Before I was spoiled by DV, I would have called the video quality fantastic). Now when I made the movie it was faster then the Spark, but not dramatically. In my own rough estimate the Spark is about 50% slower then the DC30 in my P133 system. When you look at how much more detail and brilliant color quality the DV/Spark video has, it is certainly worth the wait, or investing in a faster CPU and upgrading to NT and more memory!Analog In / DV Out
My DC30 vs Spark speed test gave me an idea. Could I take older analog footage form SVHS/Hi8 and edit it in the same timeline as the new DV footage? I figured I’d give it a try. The pixel ratio was pretty close, and I used 5:1 compression. I sandwiched a 5 second MJPEG/DC30 avi file between 2 DV clips and rendered it using the DV Soft CODEC. It worked. Yes the analog video looked lower quality and slightly stretched. It was slow, but it worked. I think that I would recommend the same technique I advise for adding several animations to an MJPEG project. First render the individual clips into the new CODEC, then bring them into the project. Conclusion
Spark is AWESOME. DV is the future. No doubt in my mind.
This is just the beginning of a revolution in videomaking. FireWire is not only a way to dump DV footage straight to your hard drive, but a frame accurate device control protocol. Future software upgrades to Spark will give you full control of the DV camcorder from your computer, so you can jog back and forth and capture only the video you want. Eventually we will be able to dump DV video to our hard drives in a fraction of real time.. The FireWire spec says 200 megabits per second, which translates to 25 megs/ sec, which is almost 10 times faster then the current DV CODEC ( 3.5 megs/sec). I can picture a day in the not to distant future when super fast FireWire drives can record a full 30 minutes of video in under 5 minutes!! We will be able to digitally archive our entire history for future generations. Tonight I saw the future of video. The revolution has begun, and it was started by just a Spark!!
Spark in stock $899.95 w/ Adobe Pemiere, $649.95 'naked'