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What Do You Use For Digital Video Editing?
Viking Coder asks: "Hello, I'd like to get involved with Digital Video recording and editing, and I was wondering what other people were using. The iMac at first seems a good option, until you see the limited hard drive and editing capabilities. Are there any pre-packaged solutions that would make for a better system? How about Linux or W2K compatibility / support? Any Open Source solutions to what would be obvious roadblocks?"
"So, I've been looking to build an eMonster 550R from eMachines, with a $500 DVRaptor from Canopus, also loading in a 30G EIDE (UDMA) HD, and Adobe Premiere 5.1, running everything from my (company's) Sony DCR-TRV103.
Am I in for a rude shock, or am I going to love what I can do? Are there other options I should be aware of? Will uLead's Media Builder (?) blow me away, or is Adobe the way to go? Is there an obvious winner card that makes the DVRaptor look silly? Is a 30G UDMA enough? Any caveats? (Like, 7,200 RPM for instance?)"
And from Rares Marian: "What tools, OSes, platforms, and hardware do I need to put a good machine together? I'm currently considering the following:- Platform: Athlon 700, Alpha, G4, SGI
- OSes: Linux, Windows, AmigaOS, BSD (are they there yet?)
- Tools: Broadcast 2000, Premiere
- Systems: PC, Amiga, Mac, Alpha, SGI
- Hardware: Linux Multimedia Labs LML33, VideoToaster
I've had some quotes from $2000 for an Amiga3K setup (hey they used it on Babylon 5, Jurassic Park, and many TV stations still use it) to an $8000 Windows Athlon based machine. Any ideas? Hint: Small Budget No Limits. (From home video to full blown Internet based publishing)"
(http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2000/apr/10fcp.ht ml),
Matrox has announced a PCI video card
(http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2000/apr/10matrox .html)
for real-time digital video editing on the Macintosh and Pinnacle Systems
(http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2000/apr/10pinnac le.html)
has announced uncompressed standard-definition and high-definition video solutions available only on the Macintosh.
We had firewire driver problems with W2K (or maybe it was SCSI controller problems), and opted for 98. We always try to avoid windows, but we didn't feel like firewire was supported well enough for linux to use linux. There is a DV editing suite made by some German company that looked promising (ie can control your DV camera / deck, plus DV editing under Linux), but we opted for Adobe Premiere instead.
For $700 (Premiere) I am not too impressed. It crashes 2-10 times per hour, (illegal instruction...hmm?), and AFAIK doesn't support PPM format for still images. The interface appears reasonable, but is hard to get used to when it crashes so often.
As far as hard drives go, we had trouble (believe it or not) getting good enough performance from our SCSI drive. Perhaps driver problems, I don't know. At any rate it was dropping frames on DV record. We opted for a cheeze-ball UDMA drive which works quite well. Memory is obviously important too. We have (I think) 512 MB. I haven't pushed it enough to need more.
Good luck, hopefully a linux based solution will crop up.
Secondly, Windows 98 has a 2 Gig file size limit. They somehow work around this and make it 4 Gigs. 4 Gigs is the equivalent of about 18 minutes of DV.
Uhh, have you ever used Linux? The 2GB limit on file size is the same in Linux, so don't say Win98 is crap because of that. If it is, then so is Linux. In fact, I haven't been able to ``somehow work around this and make it 4 Gigs'' in Linux. Hell, my 95 can recognize any size partition I give it. Linux routinely craps out at 8 GB.
I think you got it backwards... If you are going to use IDE at all (which in video editing I'd say is a bad plan) it should be to hold the software... Software is read off of disk once each time you launch the app and never read again. The place were you want low cpu utilization (where scsi excels) is when the cpu is busy with... oh say compression/video capture tasks... and thats when their is high disk activity as well because you are streaming data to it...
We bought both Mac and PC editing stations last summer. The Mac came with DV in/out, but needed an analog board (Fuse). The PC was fitted with a Canopus Rex (analog in/out, DV in/out. Both have Medea RAIDS, both use Premier, both have 386 meg of RAM and both have SCSI boot drives.
After using both for several months, we decided that the PC with NT was more stable, robust, faster, and less trouble to set up. A recent purchase was of another NT machine (similarly equipped but more RAM, bigger Medea, faster processors).
I can't say enough good things about the Canopus boards -- they just work well. The batch capture software gets around the 2 gig problem seamlessly, the integration with Premier, very good. We did our research before buying and we're glad we did -- the Canopus boards (Rex for high-end, Raptor for mid-range) are just good products.
For streaming software, we've decided that Quicktime isn't that great. It streams OK, but the problem is in rendering the hinted stream -- takes far too long on whatever juiced up hardware we throw at it. Serving using Darwin on NT has been OK, but we haven't tried to attach some sort of authentication to the process. Darwin on Mac OS X also works, but the problems with rendering streaming Quicktime has caused us to pretty much stop Quicktime development. Real Media's tools work well, do what we want, and streaming using a Linux box has been trouble-free. We're also looking at the WIMP streamer (because it's free), but haven't invested much time in it yet (because our Linux solution works so well).
elarson@a big university working with a teaching A/V group
I would have to say that Matrox's new DVE card is the best all round card for the price that I have seen out there. Most of the high end card with which I have had experience will run you 3k and up, but if you are looking for something that packs more of a punch than a low end card that won't leave your pocket full of holes, here it is. Unless you just want one of those cards that are put out there to appease the masses with only a tolerable taste of what you can do with the right tools...
We edit DV with Final Cut Pro on a Build To Order G4/500 with 512MB of RAM and two 40GB Maxtor 7200rpm drives in addition to the 10GB boot drive... Works great, nary a hitch. Those folks who were recommending After Effects obviously don't know what they are talking about as AE is a compositing program, not an editor! It's great for fancy titling and effects but clearly NOT the app for piecing together that 2 hour long-form piece. I agree with everyone's gripes about Premiere, Adobe really flailed with 5.0... Final Cut came out and most of us switched over and never checked back to see if Premiere 5.1 was more usable. Mind you, we are using DV and the 7200rpm ATA drives work fine for that but higher bandwidth such as what you would see with Aurora Fuse or Ignitor analog capture cards would require more robust drives. BTW Aurora makes excellent products, highly regarded in the Mac NLE world.
Actually, Avid has a new system out - Avid Express DV. It is PC based (IBM PC running Windows NT). Then entire system runs about $15K includeing PC and software, a 21 inch monitor, DV deck and one of those nifty Sony fire wire (I-link) / composite video converters. I have recently seen this machine demoed and the software is almost exactly like our high end Avid systems.
Avid has a lot of good post-production and storytelling software. Symphony is one of the premiere tools, but as you said, quite expensive. Another avenue is Softimage|DS (DS stands for Digital Studio). Strangely, it seems to be in competition with Symphony even though Softimage was purchased by Avid from Microsoft 2 years ago. I'm not sure what the marketing angle is on that, but I understand DS sales have fallen dramatically since Avid bought Softimage. Once again, DS is an expensive product. The worst part of the price is the hardware you need to use it. You have to get an Intergraph machine along with each seat. The tag probably runs up over $30k for the software and hardware together.
I use TMPEGEnc exclusively now; it's very fast and has high quality(and will even support MPEG-2, if you are so inclined). Only bad point is that it was written in Japanese for Win95/J, so you will get garbage unless you have a character converter like NJWIN.
p genc/.
You can get it from http://www.ingjapan.ne.jp/hori/TMPEGEnc.html; the very top link.
Miko from the Blender community wrote a very small user's guide for non-Japanese speakers; it's at http://chat.carleton.ca/~rmckay/3d/inspiration/tm
Avoid avi2mpg, it has some nasty problems with animation and VBV buffer overflows.
And on Axogon: I agree, it's quite good. I used it to build a music video a few weeks ago for Shmups! and Sakura-Con. It's not very good at handling long sound files, but as an effects package and basic editor, it can't be beat. Although I wouldn't reccommend serious stuff being done in it unless you know what you're doing; it can't lossless-undo compression codecs, so every time you edit and re-save, you'll lose quality with a recompress.
--
Just as an aside, I tried both the beta and the "stable" version, and I must say the beta version actually took quite a bit longer to crash. I could be my 2000 setup (many programs just aren't happy), but iFilmEdit still works better for MPEG-1 editing (and I hear the newer versions support MPEG-2).
"'Tis great confidence in a friend to tell him your faults, greater to tell him his." --Poor Richard's Almanac
What about the Be OS?
I thought it was supposed to be designed just for this kind of stuff. Where are they at currently? I've used it a bit and it truly is fantastic for handling multiple streams of video as well as other kinds of data. Just curious.
Co-founder and designer at Music Nearby: http://musicnearby.com
You can run Preimere, Final Cut, and After Effects, all of which rock w/ tons of available plugins. For analog stuff, look at the Targa cards.... G4's ship w/ 20 or 27 gig ATA drives, which in my experiance has been fine, if you want more speed add an adaptec card w/ dual UltraWhatever SCSI and Softraid them... For Internet publishing, you cant beat Media Cleaner Pro for compression and so forth. G4's start at about $1600, you can do a good DV system for under 4k, not including software. The Apple stuff is the way to go here.
Striped ATA66 should be all right, particularly the 7200rpms..
Just be sure to have enough archival space (DVDRAM?)
Good luck,
Your Working Boy,
Asking during NAB rollout is probably going you get a bunch of responsesm but here's some news:
http://www.apple.com/hotnews/
Apple announces new RT (realtime solutions) using DV, Matrox Cine solutions which include _uncompressed_ (!!) video all the way up to HD, acquiring Astarte DVD solutions to bring DVD authoring to Apple in house, and a new version of Final Cut Pro now with HD, 16:9 and more!
Wow! Apple seems serious about integrating these products - all the above were engineered with outside companies and Apple engineers to tie tightly with Apple hardware.
As Cartman would say it, "Schweeeeet!"
CYA
=tkk
Bill Gates - Creationist?!?
Actually, I'm using VideoWave for capture. Never heard of VirtualDub, but at first glance it looks interesting. I'll give it a try tonight. Thanks for the link.
I looked at the Dazzle and came close to buying it. The main thing it would have given me that I can't do now is the ability to save the video back out to VHS. But since I got my DVD player, VCD seems to be a much better option anyway. Plus, the WinTV card provides acceptable capture, as well as giving me a TV and radio in that room.
Thanks again for the VirtualDub link. It looks like it might be a much better solution than the built in capture in VideoWave. (Which, btw, I've found to be quite an excellent program if you're looking for something in the $99 range.)
Actually, VideoWave was a separate purchase, about $99. I'm actually getting better results with it than I've gotten with Premiere (although, that's probably just because I haven't spent enough time with Premiere). I'm not too concerned with the Sorenson compressor since my main output format is VCD which requires MPEG-1.
If you're looking for a job as an editor, ultimately, then you really have to learn to use an avid. they're strange beasts, beautiful and stupid in equal measure, but there's no substitute if you're working to broadcast quality on anything over 5 minutes long.
you might well be able to pick up a used mac-based avid at a reasonable price (ie four figures instead of six). No one can edit all the time, so consider sharing it between three or four people and expect to spend some serious money on scsi disks (and ideally a proper monitor and desk...).
we use an old quadra 900-based system that would be an antique in any other setting, and it works fine.
but check it carefully: these machines get used 18 hours a day from the day they're bought until just before they break forever.
if you just want to make films for your own art or satisfaction, then our experience has shown that you can't beat a fast powerbook, a DV camera and final cut. it's a fabulous toy box, and only disk space holds it back. we're using the old sony dv1000 camera, but the canon xl1 is looking like a better investment these days.
personally i hate premiere, but i know a couple of editors who happily use it on their messing about system, so ymmv.
The first question when you look at digital video editiing is what are you editing? I.e. what is your video source. If you use SVHS or Betacam then there is a big difference as to what you want to use then if you are grabbing footage from Digi-Beta or a 1394 complaint device.
BTW: I specialize in Video systems and NLE boxes (NLE=Non-linear editing).
If you are just grabbing the footage a analog source and splicing it together to make simple videa... you don't nedd fancy effects just cuts and such, the best system is by FAST multimedia. Its called VM Studio. Raging good system and will run on skanky hardware (486 66 will work).
If you are getting crazy call or e-mail a professional. This will save you LOTS of time and Money!
My thoughts
Rule of Life Number 2: Remember, it can all go to hell at any minute. --Jimmy Buffet
I have a Fast AV Master too, and I've been looking for ways to make it work in Linux ever since I got it. Win95 is too unstable, and the WinNT driver doesn't provide an on-screen preview. A command-line tool for capturing the video to disk in Linux would be just perfect.
Does anyone have any information whatsoever about making this card work in Linux (probably under video4linux?)? Maybe somebody is interested in writing a driver?
Yes, I've used Linux, I also didn't recommend it for this type of work if you read my post.
Last time I checked, firewire support in Linux was not too great, plus I haven't found any DV Linux software.
- sigs are for wimps.
The card I bought doesn't support Windows NT or 2000. Windows NT may support larger file sizes but it sucks for multimedia and lacks hardware drivers.
Windows 2000 improves a lot over NT, but it's still not supported by most DV programs/cards I've checked.
Windows ME is supposed to be great for video editing, but judging by the piece of crap it's based on (Win98) it should also be a pain.
My only hope is that BeOS gets some decent DV software soon ! It at least recognizes my card.
- sigs are for wimps.
Some of use want to edit 30 to 1 hour videos and keep them in a single file. Most programs don't save clips as single files, there in one file.
- sigs are for wimps.
If you are truly looking for some of the coolest high-end DV editing around, be sure to check out Trinity by Play. Their site is at http://www.play.com I remember a couple of years back that we had just spent about 100k at NASA for a D-Vision custom system, and Play finally shipped the Trinity. It would do significantly more than the D-Vision would, and only cost around 20k. The trickest part was that the effects happened in real-time. Trinity is considerably higher-end than anything from Apple, Adobe, or Avid. It is more of a complete replacement for a studio than a home setup, but it does rock, and one of the questions was about the top of the line. This is pretty darn close to it.
I just put together a system as well... It ended up being a Power Mac 8100/80, 72 megs of RAM, FWB Jackhammer SCSI card, 2x4GB Barracuda's, and a Radius VideoVision Studio card... All bought on eBay separately for about $700.00. The Mac has built in ethernet, so i can just ftp the files back and forth to my main (Win NT Workstation) machine... Overall, I'd say I'm quite happy with the set up and quality... I have a big investment in S-VHS and Hi8 gear that i didn't want to have to replace yet, and that saved it!
Actually, for video, RAM isn't really all that important... Drive bandwidth rules... as well as processing power. Why? Most any video of any length and quality is going to exeed the amount of RAM in the system, and in the end, worst case scenario (no compression) broadcast video is only going to need around 30 megabytes/second. That's an incredibly small piece of bandwidth, ram wise. Compressed video will be 5-7 megs a second (tv quality), which most hard drives can handle these days.
The processors important especially if you're working with compressed video... But while in the editting phase of a project, don't use any codec's like Sorenson or Cinepak... They just take TOO LONG to compress. Apple's generic "video" codec works fine, and doesn't hit the CPU nearly as hard.
Best of all it's guilt-free, open software.
http://www.geocities.com/virtualdub/index.html
" VirtualDub is freely distributable, copylefted software, and full source is available. So you can look the source code and use parts in your own GNU GPL copylefted programs!"
Hardware wise, Is an easy choice since the best designed, most instantly responsive, yet most affordable device is more than a purely revolutionary tool: Its a _decade_ old product! "What is it?"
It's The VideoToaster-Flyer from NewTek. *
Its software has been recently OpenSourced too! All of the tricky trick SW that controls the entire dual Zorro card / Video Slot is opened up...
The "production suite on two cards" for the Amiga is open-f**ing-source! Wow!
They now offer the next logical progression of their forte:
It's a full bandwidth, loss-less(!), resolution agile, component digital video/audio "editing _company_ on A card",
all in PCI formfactor just so you'd like it! www.newtek.com
Priced at a fraction of Avid parts...
*NewTek is a squadron of the best. They made the package LightWave. Which enabled works like: Babylon5 Titanic MnM's StarshipTroopers, etc.
How's that for clear?
Joe Torre - X - HardwareEngineer @ Amiga Inc & ZapMedia Amiga, AmigaDE, BeOS, Linuxz, QNX, Rebol, Windoze, ZME: So
Try capturing a file past the 2 gig file mark (without a special file format converter).
Quicktime is limited to 2 Gigs, as is AVI. New versions will get around this (with the OpenDMI spec), but for the moment you need a proprietary solution to this problem...
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
im way late on this post...
i use a little box called a Casablanca from draco .
its a dead simple NLE box with a 9 gig scsi drive, and it cost about $3500.
i looked into premiere and some capture boards back when i bought this thing, and decided it was just too much a pain in the ass. i would like to have the added flexibility of a computer based NLE, but for my purposes (making sales videos of machinery) it was the perfect choice.
"Tension is the great integrity" -- R. Buckminster Fuller
I have to say that I'm surprised and delighted at the lack of anti-Apple FUD in this thread. Every time I read a "apple is the best solution for DV" post I was expecting the obligatory 10 "apple blah blah sux !@$!@ closed source bastards mrrh mrrh protected memory blah preemptive multitasking frah frah steve jobs nah nah underpants" messages. And I didn't see any of that.
spreer
No you don't, especially if you enjoy dropping frames, out-of-sync audio, and general piss-poor performance overall.
A 5400rpm ATA drive is NOT going to have a decent enough seek time OR data transfer rate to store FULL FRAME FULL RATE FULL FIELD video + perfectly synced high-rate audio. especially a monsterfully huge drive like the one you speak of.
And especially each-and-every time you go to do it.
It might be fine for grabbing a minute or so of 320x240 15fps single field video + low bit rate audio from your TV card, but don't expect anything but headaches if you try to reliably capture to it, or output to tape from it.
OK, if you're talking just for storage purposes, or for the 'inbetween' editing phases, sure I've got no argument there, but for the raw in and out....no way.
Blech. Signatures.
We use discreet edit 5 here at my work . You're supposed to buy some bespoke Coompaq or IBM solution but we use a frankenstein monster and it works great. We used to use Avid MCXpress but edit came over better. discreet say they won't support you unless you have this hardware but so far they've been great.
We're running it on NT workstation 4 (sorry) OS and the HWare spec is dual P400's with 256 RAM and 60 gig of scsi disk space. Overall including the edit sware I guess it cost approx $20k. We use after effects too - but edit also expands into paint and effect. Effect is a DV compositing tool that rocks.
There are issues with the M$oft ODBC and running anything other than just edit. In short once you got edit installed and running you gotta use it standalone cos most apps (especially Outlook) will blow it to hell. Which kinda sux if you want a hybrid editing/everything else PC. Edit has lotsa functionality and is IMHO a top notch solution. But it's not a cheap one.
~~~~~###--Stresspuppy--###~~~~~
Media100 bought Digital Origin, not Avid.
Roll-your-own digital editing stations have just started to become viable over the past five years or so. Prior to that, the only way to get a reliable digital editing system was to buy a proprietary solution.
Firewire (IEEE 1394) has been a huge boon to the DIY editing station market because of its low system requirements (3.5MB/s constant datarate) and the proliferation of cheap, good quality cameras with Firewire on board.
Some choices from (in no order):
Final Cut Pro
EditDV
Raptor
Media100
Avid
Some are MacOS or Windows only and some are cross-platform.
I'd be wary of any packages that have been through less than three public revisions. Digital video is *not* trivial.
Micro$oft(R) Windoze NT(TM)
(C) Copyright 1985-1996 Micro$oft Corp.
C:\>uptime
Keep in mind that you're not going to get any ieee1394 storage support on windows without win2K.
I'd say he should get an iMac DV until he decides whether or not he's really going to use the thing. I know people who went out and spent $500 on the Raptor and never bothered to take it out of the box. It's overkill for the average non-video person.
I bought my wife an iMac and a TRV103, and she's already made movies suitable for sending to the grandparents. She was up and going instantly. She also noticed the limitations of iMovie pretty quickly. However, this guy won't notice. He probably wants to shoot the next Star Wars, but he'll end up just playing Bugdom and browsing.
I can see the capture (bttv and friends) and the playback (although I guess I'd need a video card which can drive a composite video signal(?)), but ideally it'd MPEG encode the data - is there any hardware MPEG encoding stuff under Linux?
The more I think about it, the better this idea sounds :) Once the video is in the system as an MPEG, I can replay it on my workstation over the LAN... Hours of fun!
Stephen
I have done alot of work in 3d animation and NLE,. granted not lately. This is all for Broadcast work for CA's and Promos. All footage should be shot on Sony beta cam. Here is a quick run down, this gets you a very powerful system.
Use Speed Razor Mach III or lastest release with DPS PVR cards, The system Duel PII 450 or as fast as you can get running NT 4.0 Sp4. You will need other systems for doing Animations and the like, or photoshop work. It does not hurt to have an offline workstation with Speed Razor to work out edits and previews. Of course you need a high speed network and Lots of VTR and Such, this is the expensive part.
This is much better solution that an Avid.The learning curve for any NLE package is steep, but once you are versed the render time is the only limit to what you can do.
http://www.in-sync.com/
I have been very happy with their products
The machine is a PowerMac G3 with a media 100 P6000 board and DV daughter card plus an HDRfx addon. It seems Media 100 did everything with hardware. Which makes it quite fast.
We have 384M ram (more would be nice) and two Micronet DatadockLVD RAID stacks (36G and 18G).
The only real problem with this machine is the cost. Plan on spending about $30,000US for this setup.
Media 100 does seem to have some stability issues also, but I think they are more from MacOS than Media 100. On the bright side, there Tech support and Service people are wonderful.
I would go this way if you are doing high end stuff, but it is a bit of over kill for home movies BS
Hockey - Canada's gift to the world
Hockey - Canada's gift to the world
>>The tag probably runs up over $30k for the >> software and hardware together. Not quite :) You're off by a factor of 4. U can't touch a DS system for under 100K. But remember - thats dual monitor, dual 700Mhz P3, probably 512Meg memory and gigs and gigs and gigs of disk (memory is hazy, but i think they come standard with one hour uncompressed storage). May look like a lot but u get what u pay for. (ex softimage employee).
For home or lower-end professional work, IDE kicks butt. The problem is when you're dealing with very high bandwidth (like mixing full resolution NTSC video streams), or huge piles of data. A single IDE disk is great if your project will fit on one .. but once you start needing several disks, IDE performance drops like a rock.
We used IDE-based workstations for doing our initial editing. They're great for putting together your first EDL and getting things synched and cut up roughly where you need it to be from lower resolution sources. However, if you want to be editing final broadcast quality material (for digital betacam tape, D1, or what-have-you) you need a system with some serious IO.
However, instead of blowing a ton of money on a high end system, buy some budget equipment that will "get the job done," and if you need the extra high-end equipment, you can find a good post production house that will take your EDLs and source material, and give you back an excellent product.
I've worked with several high-end editing systems, and I have to say that by far the best "all in one" solution I've found is the Jaleo (www.jaleo.com).
The way it works is a fairly big departure from "typical" commercial systems (like Avid), but IMHO it's a huge step in the right direction, and once you wrap your brain around the concepts, it's incredibly easy to use.
For one, it's layers based, not track based -- you put together layers of clips and effects. If you put an effect on a layer, it will effect all the layers underneith it. You can put clips and effects sequentially on the same layer, you can squish a bunch of layers of effects together to create a new effect .. it's great stuff.
It's also insanely configurable. Pick any resolution and any frame rate, you can import and export to dang near any media standard in existance, and it has a bitchin' language for writing plug-ins and effects. It's also UNIX (IRIX) based, so you can do whatever crazy filesystem/data manipulation you want.
Unfortunately, it's hideously expensive -- the unit I demoed weighed in at $250,000, but it was pretty decked out:
- Dual processor SGI Octane with a gig of ram and all the video options.
- Beauuuutiful wide-aspect ratio SGI/Sony 28" monitor
- 75GB Fibre-channel RAID
What really knocked my socks off was how efficient the system was at processing effects. I'm used to waiting for a Flame system to render it's effects on a similiary speced out system, but the Jaleo didn't have any problems doing a lot of the same effects in real-time (at least on NTSC video -- it started to crunch a bit on HTDV).It's probably out of your price range, but it's an awesome system none the less. :)
My friend is a video artist and wants to submit her work to some galleries. Most of her videos are ~15 minutes each on s-vhs. We were thinking of putting them on CD so we can send them out to galleries and contacts. Any ideas what format (VCD?) to put the video in so they could be _easily_ viewed on PC, mac, etc.? Quality is a perhaps more of an issue than size. Also I was thinking of picking up an All-in-wonder for the capture duties.
Beauty is truly in the eye of the tiger
You have to remember that the iMac, while inexpensive and bearing FireWire ports, is NOT intended for professional video editing. Apple's own Final Cut Pro is not even certified to work on iMacs, although they're working on it.
Here is a link from Apple's Technical Information Library on the subject.
Given the G4 and altivec, and the Mac platform's dominance in Hollywood for special effects (I'm not counting massive SGI machines that render entire Droid Battles that never happened), I would think the G4 a good choice.
woof!
I'm kinda surprised nobody has mentioned Avid Technologies (http://www.avid.com/) yet, since they seem to have a lock on Hollywood post-production. May be out of your price range though unless you can pick up a used rig somewhere.
#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
You may need to check the hardware compatibility lists, but if you are in the process of building a machine then you can make sure that your hardware is supported.
Have fun.
--sugarman--
I used B2K a few weeks back for a short audio feature. It works, I'll give it that. I have issues with the interface, however.
Some of the icons and widgets make no sense unless you dig through the documentation. The ones at the left side of each track are especially cryptic. As well, there's no place to store selections of video or audio, unless you open a second session or use other tracks for that purpose. Sometimes it felt like my fingers were dancing just to make sure tracks went where I wanted them to go. I'm considering writing my own documentation for the program. If I knew jack-all about C and programming, I'd work on the interface myself.
I can't say how well it works as a video editor. I suspect it works better for that purpose, although I still see problems with storing selections somewhere for later use. And there's still the issue of a cryptic interface. The software works fine, but some serious work needs to be done to make it intuitive.
But you can't beat the price:)...
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
And Matrox today announced a Real-Time DV Editing PCI card for the Macinotosh G4. Here's that press release.
And then Pinnacle Systems and Apple announced they are bring Uncompressed High-Definition Video to the Mac. Here's that press release.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
HI,
I'm currently working on a Non-linear video editing environment for unix
www.crow.atu.com.au
It is currently in a re-write stage. I am looking for help with the project.
Eric
The DV line of products does well for hardware stuff, but it can't do everything. I use a dual PII 400 (Soon upgrading, it's old) with 1GB of memory (Go for memory, it's worth it). I use two ultra SCSI 2 10gig drives and a Soney CDR/RW for main storage. I use a Jaz drive for portability. You need a good scanner as well (HP makes the best in my opinion). Belive it or not, I'm running a wimpy little G-Force card. It's a lot cheeper than the business-grade cards but it can keep up just fine. The only cards better will cost you upwards of $3000. Get these core tools: 1.) Win NT 2.) 3D Studio MAX r3 + Character Studio 3.) Adobe Photoshop 4.) Adobe AfterEffects The fact is, spend money on your system, because if you do this for a living, you will never keep clients by saving money and sacrificing the time it takes you to turn out a product. Everyone comes to you with a rush job, and you can't work faster than your system.
SkyLeach
It comes with it's own software (premiere sux comapred to it IMHO) which runs under windows NT.
Now the best part- it uses MPEG-2 (it's very useful if you're going to make DVDs, but it is also higher quality compared to MJPEG which is often used in other products). I mean it can encode one 50mbit (or lower) video stream in realtime or decode two streams in realtime with effects like fade etc. Of course more complex effects require rendering so you'd better buy a fast CPU or even dual. The soft is great, one of the vital features (working in hostile NT environment :) ) we like most is that it saves everyting you do instantly on a project without asking you (you can UNDO every action of course), so when NT crashes and you reboot you've got everything you had a second before system crashed
There are a lot of great things to tell about this product but I suggest you just go here and see for it yourself.
WARNING: I'm working for a Lithuanian reseller of this product so there could be some lack of objectivity here, although I swear I believe that everything I said is true. Oh, by the way we are not only resellers, we're also a video production company, actually we make most of the money from it, see some of our work if you want.
My company does alot of video editing. We have demo'd Dicreet Systems, AVID systems, and have an NT toaster of our own, and two DVRex systems, one an RT. My educated opinion in one sentence is if you have money, the Discreet systems are great whole packages in one, but are quite expensive. For the software by itself, it is thousands of dollars. Others prefer AVID. Notably AVID's new low end DV editing system Uses the Canopus DVRaptor card in an IBM Intellistation. After everything we have seen, we believe the Canopus Products are the way to go, specifically a DVRex machine. We have a live-in techie who does his best to keep the machines running, and we do not see any benefits that the discreet systems have over a souped up PC w/ a DVRex. This is because we have a technician to mind the machines when they have problems, and assemble them in the first place. If you don't have a techie, or do not wish to invest the man hours and increased problems a homebrew system has, then I suggest a Discreet. Do NOT buy an emonster. The hardware requirements and upgradability should not be possible in a machine from a low-end consumer PC supplier. ( I wouldn't go to Walmart to buy a GOOD stereo...) most people will tell you their Emachines SUCK, if they know anything. I have many more opinions on this topic =), and tales from our experience, so to keep this short if you wanna chat email jonathan@mpctexas.com Lastly, check out http://www.canopuscorp.com's user forums. They are an amazing resource for much more than their product tech support, which is superb. Their forums and support by themselves are large reason we recommend them.
If I was building a system from scratch for this, I would go with the Adaptec 8945 FireWire/SCSI controller (one card, both interfaces), and it comes with the Adobe Premire capture plug in. I have just started using Premire and it is great (although the price is high).
For disk space, 1 hour of captured DV take about 13GB, so if you want to capture edit, and then render the output video, look at 30GB of fast disk (will need to sustain about 3.5MB/sec of data transfer). ATA-33 will work with DMA transfer turned on (under Win98), but for best results, you are going to want ATA-66 (controller and disks) or Ultra SCSI (Ultra-Wide and LVD are good, but again, get ready to spend some cash).
On the Linix front, there is dvgrab and Broadcast 2000 (as already mentioned) but one thing still lacking is a DV CODEC so that the AVI's built by dvgrab can be view in Linix.
This is not the sig line you are looking for... -- Old Jedi Sig Line Trick
Actually that probably wouldn't be all that good. It would imply that the ram was shit. For something that memory intensive getting above average quality ram would be advisable.
penguinicide... when jumping out a window just won't do.
By the way studio types would constantly freak when checking out the system, and the biggest problem really was explaining to them all the things that you could do with this kind of nonlinear nonrestricted system. A conceptual barrier more than any. Maybe not a problem in your market.
Well, sounds like you have a solution... as your needs are really small, and you are comming from analouge, probably the best solution is to use whatever came with your digitising card (sounds like videoWave III ?). If you want more flexibility to cut and paste, and work without paying attention to media types, I like QuickTime Pro, at under $30 it is well worth it for either Mac or PC... and you get a version of the Sorenson compresser which will probably work better than MPEG-1 for most things.
For transitions, etc... sounds like you are right in the iMovie range, but since you seem to be on the Wintel side already, and as such it woudl cost you more to switch platforms than to buy even mid-rnge editing packages... I woudl simply wait for Microsoft to finnish up with their forthcomming responce to iMovie (the name of the project escapes me..), it will probably fill the needs you have, and I seem to remember that it was intended to e bundled with WindowsME (this was before it was called that, so things may have changed)...
In the same vein . . . I'm looking to do *low-end* video work and was wondering what the best option would be. I'm too poor to go digital, so right now I'm looking at the ATi Rage Fury Pro 32MB AGP with video in/out. Does anyone know anything about this card? How about Linux compatibility?
Well,
...
:(
linux (ext2 at least) supports files up to 4GB.
(Look at linux/fs/ext2/file.c (ext2_file_lseek()))
But dd doesn't.
And what do you need such big files for in Video editing ?
I never have clips bigger than 15-20 seconds and the final version never ends as an uncompressed file on my disk
ciao
Anti
btw:
Is there a BC2K mirror somewhere ?
heroine.linuxave.net is _very_ slow
On the other side of the screen it all looked so easy.
Yes. :(
....
And the disk itself manages to go at exactly the same speed
The times when the controller was the bottleneck are over.
Get two 15GB UDMA66 HDs for the price of one UWSCSI and RAID them
The performance of the ATA disks is _far_ superior
and you have more space.
Never swap to your "video"-disk
ciao
Anti
On the other side of the screen it all looked so easy.
My school was getting a DV editing station, lower grade, pIII 500 with DVraptor and 27GB scsi..
:)
:P
And when we finally got the puter, the idiots had put a 27GB ide hd in it, cause that was cheaper. *lol*
I can capture like 5-6 secs before the hd craps out
while, at home, on my baseconfigged blue & white G3, I can capture whatever I need.. so I capture at home and get the huge files over ftp from home.. (bandwidth is a good thing to have)
I believe Linux x86 has the same 2GB problem (do other ports support more?)
:))
Any serious person wanting to use Windows for this kind of stuff would use NT.
NT supports 16Exabyte partitions (theoretical for a 64bit filesystem, in reality it's around 4TB - but we'll have to wait for the hardware to catch up
From all of the "Making of" shows I've seen... it loks like ILM uses a lot of SGI and Apple equipment. There were some articles about this back when Episode I came out. I remember one about a guy who spent a weekend removing the puppeteer that operated C3P0's skeletal body from several scenes. He was working on a high-end PowerBook.
As far as software, I've seen the ILM guys using PhotoShop (for manually painting and editing video frames) and what I believe was RenderMan (The software developed by Pixar).
Anyway, this is all from my memory of the "making of" shows I've seen. I could be wrong.
Premiere is a pretty damn good program, if you're into Adobe products you should be in love with the software. Some interface issues, but overall the best I've worked with.
Perhaps the best you have worked with, but it sucks. I love adobe, but premiere is realy bad, the UI is nasty. After 2 years experience in non linear video editing (with Media100 xr), I had to use premiere for a project. To do anything more than just slap the clips in one after the other you spend about 1 hour looking through the manual.
For the same price you can get Final Cut Pro, and use the UI of the gods. Not to mention that the tech specs rule too.
300kb/s is 2:1 compression, only a little better than Avids AVR77.
And?
All NLE's (or every thing that a prosumer could hope to buy) compress the video. IF you need super high quality, you just create an EDL, and ship it off to a postproduction house. For TV, VHS, DV, etc. 2:1 is FINE, like just fine.
A PowerMac G4 + Final Cut Pro makes a nice package, although it might be a little more pricey than some other setups.
No, actually not, for quality video, FCP is by far the cheapest.
Let me elaborate on the quality video part of that statement:
I like to think of video editing needs in three categories:
1) Make a movie of your 3 month old son, company presentation, etc.
2) Most everything else that is not broadcast quality, this is the stuff that might have some money riding on it, a video you want to sell, etc.
3) Broadcast video.
For 1, you can slap whatever card you want in your current machine. I cant give any advice on this, I have no experience.
Other options: iMac + iMovie, slap some other card in your current machine.
For 2, get a G4 and Final Cut Pro. You will be glad you did.
Other options: Premiere + card(Don't do it man, it sucks, I have had experience with it), low end Media100 systems (too expensive), or slap some card in your current machine (low quality video, having to use brand X NLE) .
For 3, get a Media100 xr. Its only $18000 and it rocks. Works with all your existing decks, does DV, captures at 300kb/sec, real-time video and audio.
Other options: Avid (too expensive)
... is what ILM uses for equipment for video editing and the creation of computer genertaed creatures/sets. I'd love to be able to find out how they create/merge there computer generated stuff with the real people so flawlessly, yes, I know they use blue screen ;) Everyone knows Star Wars Episode I owns all other movies :P HahA (I'll probly get it for that one ;)
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
I like the G400 also, I was disappointed to discover that my G400-TV will not output to two monitors, only one monitor and one NTSC TV. It's useless for PC work because of the low-res of the TV, unless your working at 640x480 screen res.
Are you still confusing a G400 Matrox video card with a Macintosh G4?
A G400 is a video card from Matrox, not a computer. As a matter of fact it will install in an eMachine. Chill on the name-calling, we all make mistakes, this time it was your turn.
Thinking about getting an iMac isn't the same as getting one. The original poster stated, "The iMac at first seems a good option, until you see the limited hard drive and editing capabilities. I offer the guy an opinion on the G400-TV, which is a video capture card (I own and use one), and you only offer name-calling, uninformed opinion and exclamation points. ...either way you look at it, the G400 is out of the question. Are you the one who started the thread by asking for advice on NLE setups. If you are, then I'm sorry my advice wasn't useful, if not, let him decide what is "out of the question." Your incorrect information is certainly not helping anyone make an informed decision. I agree with the poster's originally posted concern that an iMac is no platform to do anything but very small scale home videos. If you have anything substantive to add, feel free.
I just put together a NLE system. Here's what I got: ABIT BE-6 motherboard (with UDMA66 onboard), PIII 450, 128MB RAM, one 30GB Western Digital UDMA66 HD and one 10GB Western Digital 66HD, a Matrox G-400TV (for analog video input and editing) and a Pinnacle Studio DV 1394 firewire capture card. I use a Canon GL-1 MiniDV camera and I've been using the Studio DV software that came with the capture card. SO far I'm very impressed. I've tried to use BEOS for it's media dedication (huge file sizes allowed), but I've given up on BEOS. I'm about to install Adobe Premiere, but it might be more then I need. Good luck
I won't pretend to be involved with broadcast level stuff, but I have done a fair amount of capture/edit/encode for a website I run. Going for a distinctly more "home" spec I use a Hauppauge PCI capture card, ULead software and lots of memory (512mb+). Disk-wise I am currently making do with plain ol' UDMA-33 IDE but hopefully that will be upgraded soon (I'm thinking of getting one of those new 75gb UDMA-66 IBM disks).
I have tried Premiere but IMHO the ulead stuff is better - it seems easier to use, the interface is a lot nicer, the realtime preview stuff works faster and it generally feels more professional.
I'd say the no.1 requirement is a lot of ram, followed by disk, then capture card and finally software.
Just my thoughts...
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
"big advantage of using a Video Toaster is that your video is handled UNCOMPRESSED"
_sigh_, could you explain how this is a benefit with the dv (compressed digital video) format?
the whole thread is predominately dv, your post is predominately dv, most people are using digital cameras which have inherent compression--so where is the "advantage"?
I bought a Canopus DVRex and a 40GB MedeaRAID a few years ago and have been very pleased with it. I shoot on a Sony DSR200A. The video goes into the computer, I edit, and it come out on video looking very nice. It works great on a K6-2/400. It worked better when I had one of the PCI video cards they recommended, but when I switched to an ATI AGP card the video didn't keep up on the screen (the video output was still great though). I haven't had any problems with the MedeaRAID, but I do feel like I could have gotten a cheaper soluttion that works just as well. Feel free to contact me via email if you have any questions.
As far as software, I spent many days searching for a good tool that could simply take a series of frames and compose some video file of any format. Then I ran accross axogon composer (http://www.axogon.com) which blew me away. I don't know if it's up to par with the level of professional video editing being discussed here, but it is free and has many features including multi-track audio/video editing and special effects. The version I have had some problems with a few of the compression codecs (maybe I don't have licenses?) but it's good for composing a basic video format file. If anyone can tell me, I'd love to know where to get a good free MPEG converter/compressor for Windows.
For video editing, I don't know that IDE will cut it. Though Ultra2SCSI adapters/drives are more expensive, their thoroughput is better than IDE, and the controller card will handle almost all of the I/O, leaving the processor free to do other things.
I'm amazed at how much people raved about the G4, it sounds like the way to go. So, now I'm off to shoot all of my video, doing some rough-cut editing on VHS. After I've tinkered enough, and if I think I have enough material to work with, I think I might just buy myself a G4! (My other Intel friends would just die if they heard me say that.)
Thanks, again!
-Viking Coder
Education is the silver bullet.
I never said I wanted "the best" - I know how much prices vary, when it comes to this stuff. (4 to 5 orders of magnitude.) Pointing out my desire to use a DCR-TRV 103 was, as you pointed out, a very consice way for me to say exactly what level of product I would be happy with - I think for the money ($649), it can't be beat.
You're right - I'm obviously not high-end. However, I will use whatever system I buy, and I did two days of research before I posted my question. I wan't satisfied with the information I found (and I had run dry on my sources), so I played my Nerd Trump Card - I Asked Slashdot. Unfortunately, my strong Intel bias limited me from finding the G4 information that I needed, making me look like an idiot to people like you. If you unintentionally overlook all the Mac DV editing options, the $499 Canopus Raptor with the full Adobe Premiere 5.1 (together) starts to seem pretty good. After looking at the Raptor Requirements, the eMonster 550R looked like more than enough machine (once you upgrade to about 256M of Ram, and toss in a second hard-drive at about 30G.) Granted, I prefer home-brewed solutions, but the couple eMachines we have at work stack up fairly well, for the price we paid for them. It's also a lot easier to describe a home-brew machine by pointing to the closest consumer-level product...
I don't want to shoot the next Star Wars; I was hoping I could make something that looked 1/10th as cool as El Mariachi. (If you don't know about El Mariachi, then it's hard to imagine you know anything about amateur film-making.) I'd like to make something maybe 5-10 minutes long, for my first attempt. Think "Bedhead", but in color. I believe this is a realistic goal, since Robert Rodriguez says he thinks that digital video is the wave of the future - that young film-makers are going to swamp the biz with fairly high-quality films for dirt cheap. I don't think he'd say that unless he'd researched it some, and he's got far better connections and a lot more money than I do.
Anyways, thanks for the unwarranted criticism - gave me something to stew over.
P.S. If most of the $7000 spent on El Mariachi was on buying and developing film, and if I spend $7000 on digital equipment, do you think I'll be able to come close to its quality? (An Arriflex 16S Camera compared to a Sony DCR-TRV 103?)
Education is the silver bullet.
A card with cable to camcorder + misc. software in VE versions can be had for $99. It is the ADS Tech Pyro firewire card. It is a good card with the OHCI standard chipset from Texas that almost everyone else is using.
You probably also want the Promise ATA-66 card, which you can convert into an IDE RAID controller with a $0.10 resistor. This gives you better throughput to disk
Perosnally, I reboot into Windows to do video capture/editing.
I am just a recreational video editor, playing with the stuff I get on tape whne skydiving.
People here use following hardware, and it seems that it works quite well: Sony EditStation ES-3 Dual PIII 500 Asus P2BDS 128Mb RAM 6 x 18G Cheetah Seagate HDDs 8Gb Fujitsu HDD for system Matrox G400 DualHead 2x ADI G66 for display Adaptec 2940 PCI (second SCSI) With that they use appropriate VCRs (DVCam, Betacam SP, Betacam DX) It is probably as high end as a private production can get. Funny thing is that dual SCSI rig. Price tag is around $80k US.
You might want to consider multiple hard drives in a striped configuration for increased I/O performance. (Striping is the same as RAID 0, using multiple hard drives for a single partition, thereby increasing, depending on your bus bandwidth of course, your disk performance.) Uncompressed digital video requires loads of disk space and a fairly high transfer rate to/from your hard drive(s). Of course with a fast enough CPU and a good enough encoding algorithm you could probably get by with only 1 hard drive. If you have money to burn, though, and want top-of-the-line, I recommend an 8-bay fibre channel disk array. Stick 6-8 36-gig Seagate Cheetahs in there and you can hit ~90MB/sec striped :)
What are good low-end solutions for analog video capture on a PC? (in terms of a the actual capturing devices, not the system used) I have been looking for some sort of "all-in-one" kind of thing that does RCA and S-Video input, and the hard part, making sure that it also does output. The closest thing I have found to this is the ATI All-in-Wonder, but that also tries to be a real 2d/3d video card, which I am not in need of. I was thinking about buying the ATI TV-wonder for $80 since its a nice Tv tuner/video capture card, but would still need to find a way to export video, which may prove costly.
- 348MB RAM
- 300Mhz G3
- 6 gig ATA drive (apps, system, finished movies)
- 9 gig Ultra Wide SCSI (work space)
- microMotion DC30 Plus capture card
- ATI Rage Orion -> 19' monitor
- ATI Rage 128 (standard G3 card) -> 19' monitor (actually this card died this morning and is being replaced with a Nexus model)
- Sony S-VHS VCR
- Adobe Premire 5.1
It works pretty well for what we've used it for so far (digitizing video tapes for internet use). I've run out of memory during capture using the highest quality setting (640x480 4mb/sec. (?)) at about 2 1/2 minutes, so more memory would be advisiable. And you should probably go for a G4 instead of the G3.andy j.
Stupid Cheap Guitars
We've been discussing the editing and hardware a lot here and I have to get my thoughts out there. Two months ago I bought a Sony TRV10 DV camcorder and it is incredible. I looked at all the sony models including the 103 which the original poster mentioned. The TRV10 has the nice mix of Firewire, tiny size, good video and audio (better than PC100), and large LCD screen. THe video quality is excellant and the on board editing capabilities surprized me very much (Video and audio). I think the 103 uses DV8 tape which is larger in size and not equal to DV in quality or size. Also the video world is going to DV rather than DV8 which is a sony thing, so any product with pure DV will have better shelf life. In my opinion, spend a few extra dollars and get on of the DV models from Sony. The prices on last years models should also be dropping since the new ones have just been released. See www.cnet.com for good reviews and user comments.
The DPS Perception or Reality boards are great options. The Reality board does uncompressed D1 quality video, dual streams and an alpha matte, and has a DV option. I have been using DPS boards for about 5 years and have been very happy with them. ... ;)
It is a shame that they won't give us Linux drivers. Perhaps if enought people bug them
**shameless plug **
Check out http://www.linuxartist.org/video-animation/ I keep a listing of Linux video and animation resources.
I just installed a Pinnacle Studio PCTV card to check out video4linux and broadcast 2000. There will be reports and reviews on linuxartist.org soon.
I have a few friends (independent filmmakers) who use AVID, and while the results are incredible and the power seems to be there, at least until recently there's been one major problem: not all AVIDs can exchange data with each other. I'm uninformed, yes, but look into this if you're considering buying one and may need to edit your work on a different machine at some point.
One of their projects was set back about a month and a half because the data wasn't readable by a machine they thought they'd be able to use.
[|]
Here is the best desktop video site on the web: videoguys
It is often the only site that has certain hard tio find items in stock. DV raptor has the best codecs of all the pc firewire cards. And you can it with the full version of premier 5.1 for $500. The competeting cards had to drop their prices is to $400 to compete, but I think the DV raptor is worth it.
The sony digital 8 camera's are not the best, but they are the cheapest digital cams out there, and better than every low-price (Sub $1000)mini-DV cam I've seen. If you are poor, digital 8 is the best choice.if you are rich, the canon XL1 is the best cam I've ever seen.
scsi hard drives are unnecessary. get the biggest IDE you can afford. DV is 4.5 minutes per gigabyte. There is hardware and software for converting DV to mpeg1 and 2, like Terran Media Cleaner Pro. Terran Media Cleaner Pro or pinnacle DC100
I've got a DPS PVR system which is an Motion-JPEG board. We initially bought it to output computer animation but eventually got the capture card too. It uses a dedicated Ultra-Wide SCSI 2 bus to do video transfers and can achieve broadcast quality (D2).
.oO0Oo.
It can also act as a video controller if your video decks use Sony BVU.
I bought it all for two thousand pounds about four years ago - couldn't tell you the retail now.
The PVR is almost entry level for their range and I can thoroughly recommend it.
It runs on Win9x but is better on NT (where it installs a virtual file system and can deliver individual frames as tga, bmp, pict and a few others so you can edit them in Photoshop even).
As for editing well it comes with a simple playlist editor which we've used to make music videos with but for more sophisticated applications it integrates with Premiere, Razor and probably a few others (and because it can deliver single frames almost any editing software will accept a stream of TGA frames as input.) It even has plugins for 3D Studio MAX.
They say they will never port the drivers to Linux because of the NDA they have with Adaptec concerning the use of the SCSI controller (they could binary only one but hey I can't force them alone).
But because it can share the drive on the network it will also work with non-Windows environments as a video server.
If you are serious about high quality video then this is a relatively cheap investment. Not having to do an offline / online edit in a "proper" edit for a few days easily paid for it the next job we had!
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Having been "out-of-the-business" for several years, I'm not sure just how dated this would be.
When I was editing, I used a dual P-Pro, 128MB RAM, quad Seagate 9.1GB Ultra Wide SCSI drives running on parallel Adaptec 2940UW. Video came through a Targa 2000RT with the breakout box. In short, the machine screamed.
Probably the most impressive part of all was the editing software though. I had used Avid's stuff on a Mac previously and hated it. Unfortuantely, my employeer thought the we should stick with Avid for the PC based stuff as well, so we started with Xpress. Thankfully, it didn't work worth crap.
Reluctantly, my boss bought the software I originally asked for (It's amazing what you can get when you're three weeks behind!), In-Sync's Speed Razor 3.5.
All I can say is that it rocked! Unlimited number of audio and video tracks. Real-time audio mixing for up to 8 tracks accross the 5 channels. Effects that would literally blow you away. Edit control like I had never had before. If it wasn't for NT, I don't think it would have ever crashed either. ;)
In-Sync is still in business and from what I can see the Razor is sharper than ever. Hmmmm, maybe I need a new box... I could finally edit out those wedding videos, kids at Christmas, dog's first birthday .....
I gave up thinking of a cool sig
See my subject. There are a few drawbacks here and there, but with this I can: 1/ capture for hours and hours on 1600kbyte/sec broadcast (720x568x25fps PAL) MJPEG. Virtualdub splits long movies up into independent AVI files of a size you specify. (1021Mbyte is a good choice) 2/ Edit the whole file, filter, make transitions, easily delete frames out (commercials, for example) without the program having to rewrite anything, and then save out to MPEG4 with the appropriate codec. 3/ Virtualdub is free.. http://www.geocities.com/virtualdub/index.html
they invented PhotoShop then Adobe bought it from them
/Aldus merger
ummm You might be thinking of PhotoStyler which belonged to Aldus(who bought it from uLead) but died with the Adobe
wasn't photoshop based on Digital Darkroom by Silicon Beach? I dont recall...
it seems odd that you cite 10 year old software as uLead's reference.
Via ATA!!! Via Final Cut Pro!!! Via la revolution!!!
I think you mean Viva.
My English teacher once told me that two positives don't make a negative. Two words for her: Yeah, right.
Not sure how much you're looking to spend, but currently the Mac is ahead in DV. If you have a large-ish budget (around 15,000 dollars) then a top-of-the-line G4 with Cinema Display and Final Cut Pro would be ideal. I don't know very much about the camera end of it, but I've heard many good things about Canon's. If you're on a much lower budget (like 5000) go for a souped up B&W G3. A friend of mine bought a B&W G3, Final Cut Pro and a Canon GL-1 for around 5000 (I think) and he's been extremely happy with it. I saw some sample work... and it's *very* high quality stuff.
My English teacher once told me that two positives don't make a negative. Two words for her: Yeah, right.
I do the video -> CD/WEB & the NLE for my company. I have tried a number of solutions on the Wintel platform and none of them work to my satisfaction. They drop frames/crash/don't work, etc. The eaiest/cheapest solution for me was a G3/G4 Mac (I use a Newertech 400 G3 in a 8500 chasis and a Powerlogix 350 G4 in a 7500 chasis). Adaptec UW scsi to an array of ibm 7,200 rpm wide drives. You should stripe the drive you are going to capture to for a extra bit of bandwidth. The Adaptec is nice since it allows you to throttle the pci when it is time to print to video. Otherwise, the pci overpowers the firewire and you drop frames on print. EditDV is a very good nle (better than Premier) and MediaCleaner with the Sorenson quicktime 2 codec an excellent media converter. Unlike some of the other products out there, these are stable and get the job done. There is nothing worse than processing a video for some large number of hours and having a freeze, blue screen of death or any of the other wintel crud that makes you have to start over against a hard deadline...
btw, please do not underestimate the appetite for disk that you will have 9 min = 2 gigs of digital video. my capture/editing machine has over 100 gigs on it and things still get tight.
If you want to "roll your own" with new equipment a Mac G3/G4 running Adobe Premiere and Adobe After Effects is the way to go. Get the largest, fastest drive you can. Drive space/speed is one of the biggest factors.
Take a hard look at systems from Avid (www.avid.com) Not cheep, but they define the industry.
Get this cheese to sick bay!
ATA drives (even spinning at 5400) are fast enough. One of the biggest mistakes I see by people diving into DV is that think that have to spend the big bucks on SCSI drives, when a $300 37.5 gig IBM Deskstar will work perfectly. Via ATA!!! Via Final Cut Pro!!! Via la revolution!!!
Cloud City Digital: DVD Production at its cheapest/finest
Final Cut Pro 1.2 on an Apple G4 cannot be beat for the price and quality. I've seen and used just about every PC DV editing system, and they are a joke compared to an Apple set-up. George Lucas cronie, Rick McCallum, recently said in an interview that Final Cut Pro has 60% of the editing and effects power as the $350,000 Avid machines that they used to make Star Wars -Episode One. If you need professional video editing on a budget, FCP is the only way to go. If you have any questions about FCP or DV feel free to post them, I'll see what I can dig up for you. Also check these links out, http://www.apple.com/finalcutpro/ http://www.2-pop.com/ This one is fantastic, you will find everything and anything you want to know about FCP and DV here, really a great little community.
Cloud City Digital: DVD Production at its cheapest/finest
which means you're stuck in the land of quicktime and mpeg, and your images get munged.
Not at all!! Bcast will do 980x540 frame sizes with RGB color, no compression. These files are huge, but there is no quality loss at all. Qucktime is a common format for professionals to exchange clips between software without loosing quality.
Of course mpeg is for delivery only.
I'm using an iMac to do my digitizing. Bcast can read the quicktime clips no problem.
Check out the post on this thread about the dvgrab util. I'm going to buy a 1394 card for my linux box and try it out. Should save me some time.
I have been using final cut pro for about a year, and for a software only solution I don't think it can be beat. I use a Sony DMC-DA1 analog to firewire converter box to capture video. This is a good solution if you don't want to shell out the money for a new dv camera right away and have a decent analog camerea. I have no trouble with dropped frames using a IBM 37.5 gig IDE drive. I do however recomend that you have a dedicated drive for capture and playback. check out some examples @: http://kunzelman.discountpetfood.net/ under digital
A PowerMac G4 + Final Cut Pro makes a nice package, although it might be a little more pricey than some other setups. We just recently got that & a Canon XL-1 for our video needs here. I haven't had a chance to do much elaborate with it yet, but have been very impressed so far.
Hard drive space is a tough question, though...we've got ~28GB devoted to our video partition, and that looks to be plenty for what we need.
Also, if you're looking to do internet stuff, you'll want to look into something like Media Cleaner Pro, which can do every kind of compression known to man, I think.
-- "" - Harpo Marx
And an assload of RAM doesnt hurt either. Ive done editing on a Mac with a 500MHz processor and 256 Megs of RAM and had it run pretty smooth, and I've edited on a 233 Pentium with 64 Megs of RAM and have it eat shit on anything over a Gig spacewise. Premiere is a pretty damn good program, if you're into Adobe products you should be in love with the software. Some interface issues, but overall the best I've worked with. For compatibility issues alone, Id go with Windows/Premeire. Sorry, I love love Linux as much as the next guy, but not for digital video editing. Sharkey
www.badassmofo.com
At school, we use iMac DV Special editions. Although I hate the mouse, the machines work quite well with 128 MB RAM (included in the SE) and the firewire interface.
"Control the media, control the mind."-Cabal
Just to clarify, the firewire interface allows you to hook up a Sony digital video camera to the iMac.
"Control the media, control the mind."-Cabal
I have administered/used many PC based Non Linear vid. systems. My 2 favourites are the Miro plus cards running with Premiere 5 (fantastic product) or the DPS perception/hollywood if you need component output. Premiere 5 is more than adequate for any realistic need (including chroma key with Ultr-matte's plugin). I have used the Perception set up for animation, and found it to work great! you can render directly to the perceptions own hard drive (using its hardware compressor on the fly!!)
A company called Draco Systems makes a VCR sized units called "Casablanca, Kron, and Avio" ( Their Web Site) Prices go from really cheap to fairly expensive. It has an internal HDD, and has RCA and FireWire as well as DV inputs and outputs. You can buy a PC connection (you have to use Windows, I think), plus you can buy bonus effects on disk, and can use your own SCSI HDD if you wish. I've seen some stuff done on it, and it looks pretty good. Their web site can add more details. Has anyone used these systems?
My email is real.
http://cf.play.com/play
looks like it does all the things this other gear does. i don't know enough about dv editing to tell you, but the price seems good and the press quotes sold me. these are some features anygood?
Along the Mac OS front:
The Aurora Igniter is an -amazing- capture card, very higly regarded and certified to work with Final Cut Pro. Nice component option for those with the highest quality sources.
Apple, Matrox, and Pinnacle are going to make a big annoucement today at the National Broadcasters Convention today in Las Vegas, so expect something pretty big from that group as well.
For DV, you're going to need A LOT of FAST disk space, and keep in mind that DV *is* 7**x4** resolution (forget the exact numbers) and you HAVE to capture at that res. at the DV frame rate.
720x480@~30FPS, with compression that's 3.5 MB/sec or as much as 16-18 GB per hour (including overhead). IDE ATA/33 can handle this, but you may want the sheer speed of the fastest drive and best seek times come time to edit and add special effects.
My friend is making a feature film. To edit we're using a G4. I'd recommend a G4 500 with as much ram as you can afford (no less than 128), a very large monitor, and (the key) firewire hard drives. You can hook up 20-30gb firewire hard drives as you need them... and they are blazingly fast. They are more than handling our needs. Just add more whenever you get low on space. Also, if you use a firewire DVcam, it makes capturing your video a snap. You can control all functions of the camera from the G4... It's a great setup, and not all that expensive.
As a editing program, we use Final Cut Pro... It blows away Adobe Premiere. If I were to set up an editing station with my $$$, I'd go Mac. That's about the only thing I would use a Mac for, I'm not an Apple person. But for this, even I'd go Apple.
Josh Sisk
There is a very good package called 601, it'll give you all the ins and outs and very good non-liner edit software, very powerful, jsut stick it on a NT machine with a gig or so of RAM, 20Gb Hd and bingo, great self contained package
You might be able to find a used AVID system, however avoid the older versions of MC express that run on the NT platform. In short, it sucks. Microsoft made sure to have the requisite number of bugs as in all MS products. Lean towards a MAC. As much as I like pc's. MAC's have been heavily involved in the Dig. Editing market longer. I have had nothing but pleasant experiences with them. Last, make sure you have a timeline. Some systems don't offer a timeline view. This is a must. (Some toaster systems dont have this) Good luck
I've owned several pro NLE systems for the last six years and I have the depleted bank account to prove it. These systems had the economic shelf life of canned corn. Useless after 18 months.
High definition non-linear editing will radically alter how theatrical film and broadcast television is post-produced. This is good. But any new system you buy will still have the shelf life of canned corn.
Even better, the announcement of the $30,000 Apple/Pinnacle uncompressed HD non-linear editing system may be the start of the end of custom professional HD/SD NLE systems.
For instance, the Avid/Soft Image uncompressed HD NLE is about $250,000 and is quite a challenge to learn. The The Accom Affinity uncompressed SD NLE is about $75,000.
BTW, you don't have a complete professional editing system without video tape recorders, monitors, sound equipment, support equipment and test equipment.
These items add up to quite a fortune. For instance, a Sony HDW500 HD VCR will set you back $67,500 and you will need several. Even better, the HD formats are mostly incompatible, so you will need to buy several flavors of HD VCR at third of a Ferrari a pop. Test equipment is equally bad and you will need lots. Allow $275,000 to $500,000 for all this HD swellness.
A professional SD editing system will also need quite a lot of expensive pro support equipment. Allow $50,000 to $80,000.
And remember, it's all worthless in 18 months.
Oh yeah, I almost forgot. A real limitation of systems based on any standard OS/CPU is it takes a while to render effects, dissolves, wipes and other production elements. This is not a big pain with a small project with no real fixed deadline but most real paying projects are big, complex and arrive at your shop at the last minute. You do want someone else to pay for your video equipment and your living expenses, right?
To solve the pain and personal embarrassment of the go out in the hallway, distract the client with card tricks and wait for the coffee to brew while the box renders yet another simple dissolve, many of the high end systems use a dedicated processor and only use the CPU as a GUI front end to the processor box. This swell idea will easily cost you $100,000 and up.
Oh yeah. The Mac/Pinnacle uncompressed HD NLE. Note that uncompressed HD video runs at a constant 150 Mbps per video stream. You may have several streams. BTW, not 150 Mbps for a few minutes, you need 150 Mbps worst case, forever. Yes, you will need serious hard driveage.
And always remember, all pro video editing equipment gets useless just as fast as your computer but it costs 100 times more.
Luck is skill supplemented by chance. ~Ketriva
I have a strong belief in the Second Amendment.
router:~# dd if=/dev/zero of=bigfile bs=1024 count=4000000
dd: bigfile: File too large
2097152+0 records in
2097151+0 records out
router:~# ls -s bigfile
2105377 bigfile
router:~# uname -a
Linux router 2.2.14 #7 Sat Jan 29 19:51:09 EST 2000 i686 unknown
not quite yet, i guess.
It doesn't seem to provide a lot of hardware support though(BT848, BT878, LML33 soon), and no DV support ( Read the discussion on firewire)
Is anyone actually using this for full scale video editing?
Everything's been downhill since the TRS-80
Adobe Premiere 5.1's what I use. It's powerful (well, it's Adobe after all), Avid Cinema (at least in my experience) is a dumbed down version, if you're new to video editing that may be a good choice too.
--Baelmix
as much as i'd love to use broadcast2000, there are no plans (and justifiably so for the authors) to use firewire. which means you're stuck in the land of quicktime and mpeg, and your images get munged.
that's all fine and dandy if you're just doing editing to create an EDL (edit list), and then offlining the actual cutting somewhere that can handle the uncompressed data. but if you're looking to produce the final cut yourself, and you're worried about degrading your images at all, this solution won't work.
the broadcast2000 author is concerned about having to fork over the cash to buy the hardware necessary to write firewire support into the system. this is a completely legitimite concern. however, i think that there must be some firewire hardware manufacturer out there that would like to see their stuff on a linux box. matrox, sony... someone out there should be able to afford the donation of a card and camera, don't you think?
Hey, Ive been a raving BeOS lunatic for sometime.
BeOS allows for files greater than 2GB and works on an ext2.
Please, whoever wrote this request for advice please use BeOS!! BeOS was made to handle massive media files for editing and makes the best use of your hardware for just this purpose. So do yourself a favor and dump the other OS's out and go with BeOS.
If you are looking for a cheap ass setup for digital video. Take a look see at getting a capture card from Hauppauge($50), which is linux compatible, also a sound card. Quicktime Pro($30), making its way into linux, Any graphics program(Adobe, Paint Shop, of course GIMP). I have a 266 AMD, with only 32 megs, 6.4 gig drive and running WIN98(Sorry, i have been dumbed by M$) It works fine. You aren't going to be putting out any Pixar pictures, but it is a cheap and good start. Build from there and learn. It doesn't take a large video program to produce good video just takes resource-fullness and creativity. I made a semi-multimedia cd for my friend's band. It's not Epic records, but it was done on this setup. Check it out a http://www.crashed.net/wot.
I have:
Pentium II 350 (OC'd to 417, but I recomend something faster
2 IBM 18 gig ATA/66 drive w/2 meg cache
FastTrack ATA/66 controller modified to be a raid controller ($25)
128 Meg RAM
ATI All-in-wonder 128
a $400 camcorder
For software I use combinations of Adobe Premire, Adobe After Effects, and Bryce 3d (works wonders wor SCI-FI backdrops)
I would usually recommend against this, but it seems to work for us. We use Dicreet Edit* 5. We have two edit bays that use it. The Celerons are a great and cheap solution for really profossional editing on a very tight budget. We had to make sure they would be stable enough under NT and they are doing their part. I don't know of any other solution that can be as inexpensive and get the job done as this one.
The one unfortunate thing about Edit is that you have to have the Matrox Digidesktop in order to have Video overlay in the Edit* Preview and Playback windows. When we use the G400 all we can do is use the Digitools over program on top of the Edit* program. I hear that Edit version 6 will have the options of having more than 1 display adapter that can overlay in the program itself. I guess we won't find out until NAB.
Here are the systems we are using right now
BP6 dual 366 o'c 550
256 MB PC133
4 IBM 37.5 GB 5400 rpm HD =
1 20GB UDMA 66 5400rpm Audio Drive
Matrox Digisuite LE
Matrox Digidesktop
2 19" monitors
2nd system
BP6 dual 366 o'c 550
256 MB PC133
4 Maxtor 40GB 5400rpm
1 20GB UDMA 66 5400rpm Audio Drive
Matrox Digisuite LE
Matrox G400
2 19" monitors
Editoverclocker
i know thats a rather definate statement in the subject, but when you really get down to brass tacks, its as simple as this: macs (g3/4's) with final cut pro loaded on them (included with that, a firewire to svideo/digital audio conversion box of some sort to wire to your decks) are quite possibly the best suited for high quality (meaning pure digital) video on the consumer/prosumer level. x86/athlon/what have you isnt really a viable solution; software like media100 or adobe premiere or avid cinema dont really make the cut, so to speak.
.. avid is the family sunday stroll of non-linear editing. over-generalized and over-simplified. furthermore, media100 could do it at one point, but at this point its primarily analouge with no real plan to make a move to digital, so you're left floating the cost of a grotesquely overpriced capture board.
.. (4gb hdd, 32mb ram?) you need a good 30gb of scsi2 harddrive space and somewhere about a quarter gig of ram to produce anything productively, and after that you need the output capabilities which imac public relations fails to mention .. that is, unless you're fasceted on a digital8 handicam or something to that effect, another peice of equipment that is unmentioned in the small print on the imac dv advertisments. i digress. while macs are good for not much else, they happen to be excellent at video and graphics, bar none. of course, this case being if your peices are consistently less than 20 minutes. anything over that with multiple shots, cuts and syncs it becomes a greater burden on your system resources.
thats just how it is.
in terms of software, again, with suggestions like avid pouring in
yet, i leave my soapboxing. there was a reference earlier to using an imac? imac dv's are undersuited
so definately, its a matter of what you need to do. non-linear is just funner.
!!niqnaq
Well as you've seen from the many responses to this post a lot of people use MAC and a lot of other people have made some distinction between MAC and PC. One thing no one has touched on is the real reason some many people suggest MAC, and may be they don't even know it. I'm also sure some others have made mention of it in earlier reply's so to those people, THANKS! Point being I've been in to the Video/DV/CG thing for nearly 8 years now and will hopefully be able to provide some good insight. MAC's main advantage is that all mac systems are mainly scsi based which means they have some very mean very fast throughput for you Video and audio to use. This makes for fast/smooth playback and editing. MAC manages to give a great price for such a sweet package which in it's self is nice. But when you compare it to the price of over all processing power in a PC and the amount of software available for the PC the MAC just doesn't hold up. The system you detailed above while good for the starter to mid range video artist is not the best way to go. If your planning to do some really mean video editing as well as keep your price in at least a some what reasonable range would be to go with the base level SGI machine with retails for around $4500. The huge upside to this system not only being the SGI pipeline is the fact that they utilize x85 processing which means you can run NT and all your usual PC graphics proggy's. In the end the determination is up to you, so good luck!
Check out the 4 press releases today from Apple (under Top Stories), and consider that Mac OS X is nearly out.
Apple's asserting themselves to be THE leader here, and OS X is the only thing that's really missing right now. But OS 9 will still get you going good...
Apple just announced some new products on this subject here
Interesting timing;
This PR release from Apple and Matrox discusses the availability of RTMac: a real-time video editing card made especially for Macs and Final-Cut.
A complete system would be less than 5000$USD, according to the release, and Apple Store.
Take a look at MainActor for Linux. Also available for windows. I tried both briefly. The Linux version ran slowly while the Windows version was unusably slow. HOWEVER Bear in mind that my 'test' consisted of draggin a 45-minute long 350MB mpeg-1 video to the editor in the hopes of snipping out the bits I wanted. The interface and tools look good, but not AS good as Premier, but the poor thing pretty much up and died on me. I was also running the latest version and not the last known stable build, so definately try this out for yourself. I'm suprised not to have heard of these folks before this on slashdot. I'd submit it as a story, but what's the use as everything I've ever sent has gotten soundly rejected, and the only reward for getting a story 'accepted' is a slight increase in status in the glazed eyes of my fellow Slashdotters. Fsck that! The Linux download for this is free, as is the Windows version (for now). It looks promising and ran without a hitch on my SuSE 6.whatever box. They also have a great web-chat thing for submitting bugs and asking questions. A for effort, I say. If you're looking to use small clips to make short animations, this could be your free ticket to ride. For non-firewire analog video capture, I HIGHLY reccomend the Dazzle DVC. MPEG-1 for $250 that connects through your USB port and DOESN'T DROP A FRAME. The included uLead Video Studio edit package is an absolute waste, but can be used to upgrade to their Pro version which is on par with Premier, and can cope with MPEG-1 / 2 out of the box. Premier is nice but SLOW and perversely buggy, even with updates.
**>>BELCH
MainActor, a commercial app runs on Linux too. Free download of fully working app.
**>>BELCH
In a word: EditDV, from DigitalOrigin (now owned by Avid)
Longer: Mac G3/300, 30 GB IDE HD, 128MB RAM (a litthe short), Canon DV camcorders.
If you considered the iMac DV, look at it again. (no, don't think iMovie, that's just a toy) EditDV works on it, and there are fast firewire hard drives for external storage. If you work mainly on DV format (as I do) it's all as seamless as uncompressed video, and you don't need a great bandwidth from the drives (6 Meg/sec will do easily).
-Kz-
Hi, :) it looks cool enough for me to wipe my NT system. However, if anyone has experience with BeOS for video editing can you offer tips? I'm interested in VideoCD/MPEG compression as well as manipulation/NLE. I've currently got a BP6 w/2x400 celerons stably clocked to 500MHz (as in, up for 3-4 weeks no glitches) and a fast 9GB UW-SCSI (soon to be 2xATA66 large HDDs striped)..
This is the one product (check mediapede) I've been waiting for to begin thinking of BeOS.. Now that R5 is out and supporting DV/IEEE1394 (thru the elcheapo cards too no less!!
Any pointers/hints appreciated!
Your Working Boy,
Well, since he never specified the type of work he wants to do, I guess I'll jump in and offer a scenario.
What I'd like to do is fairly simple. Record a TV show, capture it, edit out commercials (possibly adding nice transition effects in their place), compress to MPEG and store in VideoCD format for playback in a normal DVD player.
Obviously, since the source video is coming off of VHS tape, ultra-high quality is not an issue, but I don't want to degrade too much during editing, either.
Basically, all I want is to convert my collection of VHS tapes to VCD for my own private viewing, mainly for storage space considerations, but also just a little bit for the "just because I can" factor.
(So far I've been getting perfectly acceptable results using MGI VideoWave III, a Hauppage WinTV card for capture, and Adaptec Easy CD Creator 4 for burning to VCD. Anyone other suggestions in the same general price range?)
There are a few questions you have to ask first.
1.) Do you need broadcast quality, or is this for something like home movies? This will *dramatically* change the budget of your project.
2.) How much are you willing to spend for your project? If it's a home movie type deal, chances are you don't want a TV Studio's budget. However, if you are doing broadcast work, you don't want a home-movie budget. Plan accordingly.
Now, if you want to get into broadcast quality, you would probably want a High-End Macintosh running Adobe Premiere. (Or if you still want broadcast quality, but have a tighter budget - Get an Amiga with a Video Toaster! YES, they ARE still used! I've seen Amiga 4000 boxes with the Toaster 4000 go for about $1500. Some TV networks and movie studios are still using this very same setup.)
For a home movie type project, you don't really need all the bells and whistles that come with broadcast quality equipment. Pick up an ATI All in Wonder, or a Voodoo3 3500 TV with some cheap video editing software by ULead or something. Pipe it in from your camcorder or VCR, add some cheezy effects and viola!
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
I use a fairly inexpensive product called StudioDV from Pinnacle Systems.
I have mixed feeling about this product. I like the interface and it's very easy to use, but this program is hell to setup.
First, it requires Windows 98 SE. Yes, not only Win98 but it has to be SE. Some people have made it work with 98 and the latests drivers, but a lot of us couldn't.
Secondly, Windows 98 has a 2 Gig file size limit. They somehow work around this and make it 4 Gigs. 4 Gigs is the equivalent of about 18 minutes of DV. To get around this, they have a nice feature to capture in "preview" quality and then when you output to tape it recaptures. But man, it's really annoying to have that file size limit.
Lastly, Windows 98 is just the plain OS for this type of work. I have a fairly decent machine (128 MEGS of RAM, 400 PII, 20Gig disk UDMA, 13 Gig disk, TNT card, etc) and I have problems capturing video. Pinnacle recommeds that you run nothing while capturing video. They even go as far as to recommend turning off CD autoplay , powersave, networking, and even the little time app that runs in the taskbar.
With some of these conditions, they should have developed their own OS just tailored to the needs of their app.
I don't know about MacOS, but I've heard good reviews of the DV magazines about editing on G3s. And yes, stay away from the iMacs, plus the program that comes with the DV iMac has severe limitations and it's a pain to use.
- sigs are for wimps.
I've long been wanting to check out Trinity, made by the some of the same people who were instrumental in developing the Amiga Video Toaster.
The base package is only ~$8k usd which is damn near affordable even for a hobbyist.
The system includes the FAST 601 card, which is the hardware part of the editing system. It's about the biggest PCI card I've ever seen in my life. We've got a two machine system setup for DVD production. The FAST does the footage logging from either DV or betacam masters, editing, various effects (they give you BorisFX), then gets shot over to the other machine (the DVD authoring station) where the sucker is chaptered and menued up, tested and finally imaged out to DLT that gets sent out to duplication. Warning: it ain't cheap.
Then again, those guys are doing big-time work. If you're looking to do some editing on little Johnny's first communion that was shot on a vhs camcorder, buy an iMac DV.
As for the question of how much disk space, the answer is "infinite". Our FAST has a 100G Medea unit attached to it, and it handles about 4 hours of video, MPEG2-V compressed. The FAST is more interesting than stuff from people like Avid, since it actually edits in MPEG2. The biggest problem you'll have is transfer rate. Think raid0 with a number of disks. That's how Medea does it. Insider their little black boxes are 3 or 4 large UDMA66 drives that are connected to a RAID0 controller. On the back-side, it looks like an UW SCSI-3 device.
If you're serious, get your butt on a plane and get to Vegas right now. NAB2000 is going on, and every major video editing company there is will be there.
--
The unsig!
Check out their website, they go in to good detail about what software they used, what techniques and what hardware they used for movies such as Twister, American Pie, Stir of Echoes, Dr Doolittle, etc. http://www.bftr.com Lots of eye candy, too.
-- 100% MS-Free as of 4-4-1999, 11:47:38 PST. "The lapdance is always better when the stripper is cryin'" Free Kevin,
I have a Fast AV Master, which comes with Ulead Media Studio. While the package isn't as unified as Media 100's system or Avid, it is a very capable system that will certainly do the job. This package definately gives Adobe Primiere a run for its money.
/dev/sdc5, a 50 gig partition. Piece o' cake.
As for storage space, you should get a Medea VideoRAID (find it on www.videoguys.com). These things can do 24 MB/s sustained, even when the drive is full. Moreover, it just plugs into a scsi chain and requires no drivers or striping tools. I attached it to my machine, and suddenly linux saw
The DV camera I bought came with a coupon for Digital Origins's IntroDV. Since I was not at sure I wanted to get serious about video editing, I wanted something inexpensive, but upgradeable. I bought the IntroDV, which included a firewire card, software that transfers video from camera to disk and VERY minimal editing capability. Less than $300 got me a 40GB UltraDMA hard drive, which is fast enough to transfer video with no frame loss (Had to spend another $60 for an UltraDMA card because my system was all of a year old). Spent another $100 to upgrade to EditDV Unplugged and that's what I've been using for the last few months.
I'm starting to like it a whole lot, so I'll probably upgrade to the full version of EditDV. For an inexpensive intro with upgrade to full capability, I don't think you can beat these guys.
Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation
Information is not Knowledge
I hate to say it, but UDMA @ 7200RPM works great. I am a big fan of SCSI, but the price difference is too much right now. Also, make sure you have a working disk, scratch disk, and possibly even an audio scratch disk for your software. This will make a world of difference in performance. I would also recommend going with a dual processor system - Wintel if possible. If you plan on using After Effects, plan on as much memory as possible (I would recommend starting at 512 meg if you are serious.)
There are also some Linux compatable cards and software if you look at some of the old Slashdot posts.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
An Anonymous Coward writes:
I think you got it backwards... If you are going to use IDE at all (which in video editing I'd say is a bad plan) it should be to hold the
software... Software is read off of disk once each time you launch the app and never read again. The place were you want low cpu
utilization (where scsi excels) is when the cpu is busy with... oh say compression/video capture tasks... and thats when their is high disk
activity as well because you are streaming data to it...
Does anybody actually use their CPU to compress video as it's being captured these days? Either you capture raw video with no compression and then compress it later after editing, or if you have a good capture card your video card automatically compresses the data before it's passed along to the CPU. IDE is okay for capture.
An Anonymous Coward writes:
s /FileManager/filemanager.html
"It works good for small& longer video clips up to about 18min..after that its no good due to 2Gb limit on filesystem?"
The HFS+ filesystem itself doesn't have a 2 gig file size limit, but until recently the system calls Apple provided for accessing HFS+ disks did have that limit.
Apple removed that limit in Mac OS 9.0, but most software hasn't yet been updated to use the new filesystem calls that support larger files.
If you want to bother the vendor of the software you're using, you can remind them that the docs on the new system calls are available here:
http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/macos8/File
This preliminary document describes the File Manager application programming interfaces introduced in Mac OS 9. These interfaces allow your application to access files larger than 2GB and use long Unicode filenames. The Mac OS 9 File Manager programming interfaces are emulated for volume formats that don't support these interfaces directly.
There is an inherent assumption in the question, that the source and output media will be the same. First off, I might have MiniDV source and I may be outputting to DVD. These use different compression algorithms. Second, I may be outputting to an analog format, like VHS, Betacam SP or 3/4" tapes. Finally and probably of the least impact, there is a difference in how different recorders encode even the same format.
When you take source material that's already compressed add edit layers and effects then recompress it you get compression artifacts.
Better to take the source (camera) material decompress it. Edit it uncompressed add any uncompressed effects and titling, then compress that. You get fewer artifacts.
If you are just using NLE for some simple cuts and arrangements and adding some simple titles, handling the material compressed may be acceptable for all but broadcast level reproduction. The more you do to the source in post-production the more you need to handle the material uncompressed.
If I have a composite shot of a rendered vehicle, rendered background, foreground actors and set, studio sound then titling, that's five layers of material. Any of that is subject to editing for multiple camera views. If you try a shot like that using one of the DV boards that handle everything compressed, you are going to have one ugly composite final cut. Even with good DV source material you'll end up looking like you shot with an old cheap VHS consumer camcorder.
An example of the above shot would be the Babylon 5 Command deck or the Bridge of the Enterprise on Star Trek. You have the Captain and someone talking in front of the viewscreen/viewport. The viewscreen has some activity in it, a ship or planet moving or rotating or whatever. The background of the viewscreen is a rendered starfield. The ships/planet are either rendered or are models bluescreened in. On the set you have a bunch of computer terminals with changing output, that has to be added in post or else you get that flicker effect you see with monitors on the news. Finally you throw in some opening credits along the bottom, you know guest stars etc. In Babylon 5 they once had this shot set up from the perspective of a news camera that superimposed its station identification in real time.
Those shows both shot film, so they had a lot of problems with those shots, they end up costing a lot. They simply can't be done (yet) to broadcast standards with editing boards that handle the video while it is compressed. Of course a lot of those boards can't put out broadcast quality at all, I refer to the ones that claim to do so.
The Video Toaster is among those systems that can accomplish this shot to the highest video production standards. It is right up there with the AVID and Media 100 systems as far as quality goes. As a matter of fact, Babylon 5 used Video Toasters for a great deal of their work, so the shots cost them a lot less than Star Trek shots cost. (Using film makes it harder to edit the source material, and forces you to go with higher resolution renderings. You also have a conversion step. That is why B5's shot cost a lot more than the same shot using a Toaster and DV/MiniDV source material.)
Slightly offtopic, but I can't resist...The reason B5, X-Files and Star Trek are shot on film is to create a darker deeper image. The result using film also looks sharper. High Density Video may well change that. [drool]I can't wait to get my hands on an HDCAM and a system that can handle HD in/out... [/drool]
Don't post innacurate information
If you do, I swear by my pretty floral bonnet I will end you.
On my Linux system I saved about 20 min. worth of raw digital video footage using a little command-line only utility: dvgrab. Not even one dropped frame, all scenes separated neatly into individual files. About 4 GByte total.
After that I edited the video using Windows98 and ULead VideoStudio 3.0. It crashed only once. Right now it is rendering the final MPEG movie.
The hardware, not exactly state-of-the-art:
a 5 year old PC with an AMD 333 MHz, 64 MByte RAM and a 10 GByte IDE disk
a 1394 card (EXSYS-6500, about $100 including software)
Sony PC-100 DV camcorder
Currently I am looking for a programmer who could help writing a DV codec. When we have this, we can do basic DV editing completely using available Linux software. The major missing component however is the codec. If you have some knowledge in this area, please send an email.
Arne Schirmacher
I've seen a Mac based system used for broadcast quality work. Premiere and After Effects were the main software, but you can use anything to draw frames. A separate tower built with a bunch of fast hard disks striping for speed handled live recording and playback. A beta deck is needed for commercial work but quality wise DV is very close.
Basically you show people your work, they say let's change this, you do it while they stare over your shoulder, then you hit render, and let the guys fall asleep on the couch. Video can be fully on disk or part on tape. Extremely cost effective even on an 8400 Mac, though G4 is what you would want now 30 gigs will disappear in a flash, get yourself dat backup. Get a mixing board for music input or maybe you could do it on the Mac.
There were some problems with Premiere that could crash the system if you touch files that Premiere is working with, but this kind of interactivity and customizability is a new thing.. the only problem being that studio types and operators also are used to Avid.
Biggest bitches seem to be the need to replace hard drives when they die (apparently 3-4 months sometimes), and also dealing with video card manufacturer.. a very expensive video card is important. These two points mean that you need to have some knowledge of hardware.
No matter what hardware you end up with, remember what you are asking it to do. .mpeg to .avi (if you needed to, for some reason) , will take forever on any decent length film. As long as you remember to be patient, the systems you are looking at will be ok.
It will be substantially slower than you are expecting, the same as compiling. For any non-trivial project, compile times become enormous. Doing conversions in Premiere, for example, from
If you want to do professional work, however, you need to go with an AVID system. They are brutally expensive, but it is what the pros in Hollywood use.
Computers can only simulate determinism. ~Hermetic.
Yeah, but Apple's the current leader in the DV market. You can't say that the market sucks based on your experiences with #2.
The iMac with iMovie is a consumer product. A G4-based system with Final Cut Pro (and possibly Premiere and After Effects) is what you should have looked at.
Also, you should know that Adobe optimizes their software for NT. I've supported their software on 95/98 systems, and quirky problems tend to crop up.
What does all that add up to? Probably that Windows is not poised to conquer the DV market just yet.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
this is not just about emachines, but since they were mentioned... do not buy an e-machines or other leading-economy-brand wintel box, you will be sorry.
on the low end, for power-users seeking to save money, shop around for a used blue-and-white g3 (perhaps with scsi, your preference)... you can get deals on the software, camera, everything you need, but you have to be knowledgeable to save money.
bottom-line is you have a higher likelihood of distressing down-time with a cost-cutting wintel box. there is a reason apple dominates this market (since when have you seen such a macintosh-positive thread), borrow/rent/test-drive a real setup to see why.
and whatever you do, back up. dv source tapes are the primary backup, but you want to have your final rendering backed up, and you *must* have the edit list (project file) backed up.
if money is not an issue, buy whatever hotrod box you like, you will be able throw together some kludge to do most of what you want or need, but do not think you can save money on a cheap wintel box when working with media (print, audio, visual, whatever).
big picture: most people will not really save money that way, other expenses related to using junk hardware/software will eliminate the savings.
Anyway...we investigated and selected hard-/software and other components necessary to replace our expensive out-side video consultants. They did awesome work with extremely expensive analog tools (we're in SoCal, so these studio firms are plentiful). But, we could not afford them. So we hired some professional graphic artists (with video experience) and built an in-house studio.
We were producing audio programs for international radio distribution using MS Win computers running SAW 32 and were able to do pretty good work with a low budget. But we definitely realized we could not stay with Windows machines for our new video studio. Main reason? Our lead video expert is a Mac-head. Ding. Sometimes it's not the platform, but the personnel.
Ok, then we got hold of Mac G3's and Adobe Premiere 5.1 & After Effects (like I said...not too specific). The Mac G3 had built in IEEE1394 and we used the MAC DV codec. We also had a Sony DV Cam (essential; freed up our Cannon XL/1 for shooting instead of playback).
For storage we bought some Utra-SCSI II LVM IBM 9 GB disks and built a cheap little 4 drive RAID 0 unit. This was the only way we could suck down video without dropping frames (an essential requirement for pro video, duh).
But, Oh Boy! Premiere is ss-ll-oo-ww! We had a 45 minute initial video program to produce (of course, under an extremely tight schedule, which we spent most of the time building the systems...including trying to find the *exact* SCSI terminator required for the drives we bought at Fry's; eventually, we called the IBM-specified terminator mfg company and they, Oh, what is their name??, sent us a *SAMPLE* terminator fReE! Overnight, Saturday delievery! Why? Because they had no distributors in LA! Wha?... but I digress...heh) and (I'll wait while you back reference to get context....ok) Premiere took over 24 hours to render the final production. Arrrrggghhh!!
Then we moved to Final Cut Pro by Apple. Sweet! Fast! Intuitive! The same video production that took us so long on Premiere was accomplished in 1/100th the time. Same people involved, too.
And the G4 helped, too, when we could get one.
All in all, we have 3 workstations (Mac G3, Mac G4, PowerMac--poor guy!), 1 Cannon XL/1, numerous MiniDV cams(all Sonys; Sony has the best optics), 2 Sony DV Cams (to free up the cameras during playback). We use FCP and After Effects and produce some pretty radical stuff.
The studio we previously used visited us and saw one of our productions. They were stunned at what we could do with basically consumer equipment. Since then, they've invested in similar equipment, because it's almost as good as their analog studio but much faster.
Then, at home, I have a Pyro Firewire card ($160), an AMD K6-2 333 with a couple of drives ($378 Jan 1999), including a 10GB 7200 rpm IBM ($150 at Fry's last Fall), and use the Ulead Brain-Dead Studio Software (I think that's the name) that came with the Pyro IEEE 1394 card, and a Sony TVR-110 ($600). With this I was able to film the birth of my firstborn son (sorry, nothing graphic) and put it on the 'net. I'd give you the link, but it's already next to my name). It's not pro (or even amatuer) but it made the grandparents across the country cry.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
I work in a military Video Production facility....for all of our non linear editing we use Avid which runs on a Mac platform and comes packaged complete with all software and hardware neccessary with the exception of the drives...you must buy the extended drive storage arrays's specifically from Avid which allow you to store all the media that gets digitized. Now that is the only real sucky part about Avid's. The service has been excellent. They don't crash ever really either. We have one other edit machine. A "linear" I say it with quotes because it is semi linear semi non. Officially linear though. The company we purchased it from was Play. It is called the Trinity system running a Clone made by Intergraph computers......OS is NT 4.0 450Mhz CPU Intel Pentium 3. The actual Switcher is Software based which controls the hardware that all your equipment plugs into. It comes in two seperate units...the clone the runs the software and the box that houses the hardware interfaces. Total of 196 Megs of RAM (I am sorry the specs are so random I am typing as I think of it). I personally think it sucks ass....the Panamation function crashes constantly and there is all kinds of little bugs throughout the system. It contains too little functionality with too high a rate of errors in the program and OS itself to make it dependable. But then again anything run under a windows platform is bound to crash. I would recommend Avid. The mac version if you can still get it..they were switching to NT. Byron Email byron150@home.com
-Never believe in the end of something great, send it to sub-committee for further study!!! - ME
BROADCAST2000!!
Everything you need to edit stuff from web content to film.
Don't forget the GIMP either. Works great for all sorts of effects if you know a little Perl.
Be sure and check out Sound & MIDI Software For Linux for a whole slew of audio tools.
The makers of Broadcast2000 have some great mpeg-2 encoding tools as well.
Use Linux for your project! It gives you total access to your media, it's stable and cheap. I've been using it to edit my documentary and I'm really happy with it.
We got ours several months ago, I am very happy with it.
A quick run down of the system I use:
p3 500
512 ram
tnt2 V770 VIDEO CARD
Video Toaster for in/out
We went with the Video Toaster NT for one main reason... Uncompressed NTSC for CHEAP!!!
The card is packaged with Speed Razor SE(non-linear editor, its capable, but for real-time i would suggest its big brother, Speed Razor RT), Newtek's AURA which is a really handy video paint/compositing/photoshop kind of app that is EXCELLENT..Newtek's LIGHTWAVE VT..(its a stripped down version of the excellent Lightwave 3d which is used on Voyager, Starship Troopers, and a ton of others..this version of the software is adequate for most needs, especially if you are new to 3d, but we have the full blown Lightwave runnin on our machines because we need the advanced features..The VT package also comes with a few other handy apps..
One of the main selling points about the VT is that its completely software based...not like the old Amiga Flyers, which were dependent on propriety hardware..This system depends 100% on software operations, so if you decide to do some more advanced stuff later on, just upgrade your system processor, you'll be good to go.. I might add that our p3 500 handles all of the applications quite well.
One other consideration:
The (REALLY DAMN HIGH QUALITY) uncompressed video that the VT captures and spits out takes up hefty chunks of disk space..To even capture vidoe your drives need to write 21megs a sec SUSTAINED! WE accomplish this through a cheap ($99) PROMISE FastTrak RAID Controller..four 20 gig ATA66 drives get put though that...it turns out to be damned cheap and gives you tons of space with a storage solution that can sustain 23megs-a-sec..
So anyway, I'm very happy with what we got for a kickass price(Remember, Uncompressed 720x480 30fps!)
any other question s lemme know, i'd be glad to anwer any
The path to hell is paved with least resistance.
Disclaimer: This solution only works if you're satisfied with Windows...
:)
That said, I bought a Sony VAIO Digital Studio desktop about 8 months ago. PIII/500, 256 MB RAM (128 comes standard), 16MB ATI Rage Pro 128, 20 GB 7200 RPM drive, DVD-ROM, CD-R/CD-RW burner, and nice USB and FireWire ports right on the front panel.
The newer ones have (I believe) a PIII/650 but are essentially the same machine. Cost around $1700 w/o monitor. For a monitor, I use a Mitsubishi Diamond Plus 100e 21" (around $1000).
The best part about this package is you unpack it, set it up, and it comes with all the video capture and editing software you need (at least for home movies, which is what I use it for). It's been a pretty decent machine overall, once I got the right FireWire software (the package it came with caused system lockups a lot, the new VAIO may have fixed this though).
For the price (about $2900 w/monitor & additional 128 MB RAM), and the ease of use, I'd recommend it. Don't know if it holds up to professional standards though
like the Matrox G400. It has Dual monitor support, or you can hook up a DVD to the second monitor port and still use the PC. And on top of that there is great open source uspport for Matrox products.
I've captured about 20 hours using a dual Pentium II, dual SCSI (40 meg) and a variety of SCSI drive combinations under Windows NT Server -- backup domain controller actually :-). Twin 9 gig, 10K, striped drives work under all conditions. Single 36 gig, 7200 drives work if there is no fragmentation.
For work, we have a dual Xeon, 10K boot drive, and a 75 gig Medea Video RAID using the Canopus Rex (like Raptor, but with better hardware, slightly better software, analog in/out, and a hardware CODEC that speeds rendering). Adobe Premier and Real Video as back-end technologies.
UDMA drives can work on very fast systems if their isn't much fragmentation. You roll the dice as the machines gets older, if the UDMA doesn't work, etc.. Dedicated RAID hardware is best, SCSI second, UDMA dead last. Failures are obvious (won't capture) and missing can be expensive (as you have to buy new hardware.
The video camera is the cheapest aspect of the system (Computer first, decent audio hardware second, camera third -- usually -- buy a real pro camera and audio will cost less).
Professionals buy DV decks (circa $3,000 +) and real Cameras (circa $7,500 +). I make do with a cheesy Canon ZR because it looks like a still camera and folks often don't realize I'm taking DV video (did this at Comdex last fall -- three hours).
elarson@a big university working with an A/V teaching group.
I put together a High quality DV editing system for a friend of mine last year. We used a P2-450, 256 megs RAM, 10 gig IDE hard drive, 9.1 gig SCSI-3 hard drive, 17 inch monitor, Diamond Viper 550 video card, and a DV Master card from Fast. The total cost was under $6000 not including a studio monitor which they added later for $700). The DV Master costs $3500 by itself.
This setup gives you a hardware DV codec, which makes editing sooo much faster. I wouldn't even consider a software codec (ie MacDV, or whatever chintzy capture card you can get for under $1000 for the PC) if you're planning on doing anything professional. It'll take forever. Software solutions are fine for editing your vacation videos, but will cost you money (ie time) for a pro job.
The system accepts DV format video via ieee 1394, or standard audio/video via rca(YUV and RGB in both NTSC and PAL/SECAM), 1/4 inch jack, and S-Video, and puts out signal to all of these formats.
The DV Master comes with a special version of Speed Razor made to interact specifically with the DV Master hardware. Because we have a hardware codec, we can edit DV format files, instead of capturing to quicktime files then dumping back to DV. It's a really great system.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
If you want high-quality digital video, you'll NEED a digital video camera connected to a DV board with firewire. We used Adobe Premier 5.1, which is probably the best editing suite out there for entry-level people. It's a little buggy, so save often!
My own personal experience has been with the Miro DV500 - one of the best DV cards out there. We hooked it up to the Sony DV Camera and were up and running in seconds. If you want to see amazing capture quality, snag 30 seconds or so from a DVD to the DV camera. After that the copy protection circuitry cuts in, but MAN is that great looking.
Don't get fooled into buying an analog capture board. They're nice for ripping TV shows to AVI or something, but if you're like me and want to eventually get your footage on DVD, make sure it's digital. There's a Linux firewire project going on right now, but I don't know how far it is along. Windows is your only bet for this right now, but this is definitely going to change in the future.
I'm tempted to get a DV recorder for use as a VCR. The quality is so far above analog it's not funny.
æeee!
Well, there's no "right" answer, just like most technical questions.
Many people will be glad to sell you whatever they want, or tell you something else sucks, but if you don't know the specs and what you want to do with it you'll wind up with the wrong system.
For example, you mantion using a DV Raptor with a 30GB hard drive. You do realize that DV is 18GB/hour? That hard drive will be full before you can sneeze, much less get any work done. Unless you're doing all 2-3 minute projects without much footage lying around on the disk.
Also, there is still a 2 GB file size limit on Mac/PC. This is the biggest obstacle any beginner (inexperienced) editor runs across because you usually don't hit that wall no matter how hard you're pushing a system.
Find out how the system you're using gets around that limit -- does it require a special program to do editing and read the file? If you want to use Premiere, then make sure the board does Premiere capture and export.
Frankly, for all the greatness of DV, the file sizes are insane. MPEG2 boards can cut5 down file sizes by setting compression level, and if you're doing one-off editing projects youll never notice the difference.
If you're doing web delivery, you might want a board that will capture at 320x240 so all you video isn't 10 times the size you need it. DV and many MPEG2 boards won't let you do anything aside from full DV frame size (~720x640, depending).
This is a lot of data, but any UDMA66 drive can nadle it. Even at 25Mb/second (which you won't go over) you can save money by not buying SCSI. This is not 1987 any more -- IDE is plently fast.
Gotta go to a meeting, but you might want to do more research before buying, it doesn't sound like you're sure what all the specs you're dealing with are. You needs lots of disk space, and no less than 128MB RAM (256 is better, I use 512)...
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
If you have no limit to your spending, you're going to want the best. Using an Amiga would only be a solution if you're happy with 640x480 video and can afford acceleration boards (if they're still available). Jurassic Park was --not-- done on Amigas. Some of the dinosaur rough-up proof-of-concept animations were done on an Amiga with Lightwave, but all of the final work was done on high-end workstations and edited the old fashioned way on film.
An Amiga equipped to do desktop video with a Video Toaster can do full broadcast-quality resolution (784x492 or whatever) in 24bit color. Lightwave on the Amiga can also render to that resolution or better.
If one were to purchase a Video Toaster-equipped Amiga in this modern world, he would want it to be an Amiga 4000 with a Video Toaster 4000. Any _new_ VT/Amiga system is exactly that. The Amiga 4000 has the updated AGA graphics chipset which can do higher resolutions at more colors (compared to the OCS/ECS chipset in earlier Amiga models such as the A500, A2000, and A3000). The VT4000 takes advantage of the AGA chipset, so it can do some neat things the old original Toaster can't.
There's also the Video Toaster Flyer, which has a spider-like 6-way (?) SCSI controller on-board. It does high-speed on-disk video editing. Remember that the old Video Toaster and VT4000 are not for editing video clips stored on disk, they switch between video sources and fade and grab video and genlock and change colors and render text and apply 3D graphics and all sorts of other neat things -- and it's all done in hardware, so it's blazing fast.
I have never seen the Video Toaster Flyer in action, but I hear it is neat. Seems that it can do almost all the things that its big-name competitors have implemented, while perhaps requiring more creativity. That is to be expected, though, since it is a product on the Amiga, the choice for creative professionals. ;)
And yes, accelerators are still available, both used and new, for all Amiga models. A few places to check would be Software Hut and Compuquick Media Center. They seem to be two of the leading Amiga dealerships these days.
Check out Newtek's website, they have had a number of deals lately on their Video Toaster line.
The only problem with getting into Amiga production these days is researching all the software available. A lot of it still sits on shelves at the older Amiga dealerships, waiting to be bought and used. When combined well, the old software packages all mingle to form one really powerful system (again, when used creatively). Remember that the Amiga was years ahead of its time, so though a program may have a (C) date of 1993, it could still be very useful and productive. Also, most decent Amiga applications can talk to each other (and the Toaster / Switcher) through ARexx scripting. Combining the Toaster with the kick-ass ImageFX package and a modeller like Pixel3D can really melt an audience's mind.
I am working on a research project to use Linux to record and edit professional quality video such as S-VHS video cassettes. We are using frame accurate methods to record so editing is pretty minimal.
Each frame is rendered on a Linux Beowulf cluster and stored on a large hard drive in PPM format. Next each frame is loaded into a frame buffer that supports component video out. The image is then recorded onto a Sony LVR/LVS 5000. A Linux machine completely controls the LVR. (Code is GPL'd of course.) From there we use the rs-422 remote control interface of the LVR and a JVC S-VHS VCR BR-S822U to edit and make S-VHS and VHS recordings.
The problem that I have is finding a frame buffer card for Linux that supports component video out. There is lots of stuff for getting video in but that is not what I need at this point. Currently, I am using an SGI O2 for video out. Unfortunately, the video hardware is crippled forcing me to reduce the quality of video it will produce. Any one have any suggestions about a frame buffer?
With the proper frame buffer I will be able to quickly record with excellent quality each frame. (These frames make up a scientific animation of myoglobin.)
Please take a look at the website at http://prisant.ncsu.edu/~neely
The website is a bit out of date but will be updated soon. You can also e-mail me at jjneely@eos.ncsu.edu with any questions, comments or sugfgestions on video cards. You may be interested in the group of people I am researching with. Please see http://prisant.ncsu.edu
One of the outstanding goals of this project is to create a complete Linux and Open Source solution. We would also like to create DVDs of these animations but that's a completely different story.
Jack Neely
I produce professional quality industrial and broadcast video on the following: Mac G-4 450, 10GB HD for software (master), 27GB Ultra ATA (slave) just for video, 256MB RAM, Miro DC-30 pro, Premiere 5.1 (comes bundled with the miro card). We get about the same quality from this setup as we do in offline AVID, but the total cost of this setup was about $3500. If you are interested in going the Wintel route, Matrox has a ca. $1200 video card that is comparable to AVID for real-time effects rendering.
Our setup requires a bit of render-then-output tweaking to get Beta-SP quality video out, but the cost to results are better than any other combination that I've found. If you need more drive space, you can always plug into the FW/1392 ports. In my experience, this setup (on Mac) is much more stable than the same software on Wintel -- been doing this sort of thing about 6 years.
ZI
I used a G3 Mac with Media 100 edit system and extra 10+50Gb scsi (about 8000$ If Im not wrong)
:) :)
You are wrong
Media 100 is great, but veeeeerrrrry exspensive (but less then avid).
Their bottom of the line "DV" model (was the le model) is "only" $3500. The DV has no Insert & Assemble Edit, you must get the lx model for $8000 if you want that (you do). Once you are to that level, go ahead and go one step up to the xe for $11000 and get realtime audio. For $2000 more you can get the xs model and get realtime video. For studio online qualtiy work, get the xr for $18000.
If you can pay that though, you get by far the best editing system out there. The GUI is sweet, it is very stable (exespt for the built in graphics program, use after efects), and it is easy to learn for a newbie (took me about a week to learn fully at age 15
Otherwise, I recomend Final Cut Pro. For $1000 you can do DV quality editing in a great interface (very similar to Media100 actualy) with a G3 (I recomend a G4). I am useing it now, and it works great.
Matrox is dealing big time in Macintosh ware these days. Apple has gotten together with Matrox to build a very powerful Real-Time DV card for the G4. Today's press release detail some of the more salient points.
Matrox and Apple Announce Real-Time DV Editing for the Mac
NAB 2000 Convention
Matrox Video
NAB2000, LAS VEGAS--April 10, 2000--Matrox Video Products Group and Apple® today announced the first PCI video card for real-time digital video (DV) editing on the Macintosh®. The RTMac, architected by Matrox and Apple engineers, is tightly integrated with Apple's award-winning Final Cut Pro(TM) video creation software to provide real-time editing, effects and compositing. Fully configured systems are expected to start at under $5,000
There is also a rumor that Matrox may replace ATI as Apple's video card supplier.
--
He lives in a world where those who do not run the client software of the omnipresent meme are unacceptable.
Right now, all the serious folks are using Mac G4's with plenty of fast HD space, RAM, etc.
Take a look see.
Video editing is a HUGE market. There exists a solution on anything that'll run it. The big thing to think about when putting together an NLE (non linear editng) suite is what formats you will capture/output in.
Capturing.
How are you going to log your tapes? Most productions have waves of interns logging the in and out points of all the juicy bits of video on a given reel. The producers then grab the logs, look at the pieces they have to deal with, and puzzle together a show with it (a jigsaw puzzle without benefit of a picure). They do this by generating an EDL (edit decision list) which contains the reels and smpte in/outs of all the clips they want to use. NLE software uses this file as an instruction sheet, and controlls the decks to send video to the capture card.
Output:
Are you outputting to the web? NTSC? PAL? 601DV? The NLE solution you need may be much cheaper if you don't have to deal with the hack that is NTSC.
So it is imperitive that you take into account what video formats your tapes will be in (if analog, then you'll need a capture card and software that supports it, if DV, you need firewire and your NLE must have the DV codec). You may want to standardize on input format if analog, to save money on decks (you don't want to use your camera to send video to the NLE, what if you want to capture and shoot at the same time.) Output is important, because you may not need an expensive NLE if your putting movies on the web.
Unfortuneately, most of these suites are for NT (SCSI is a black art on these boxen), but some are cross platform. M=mac, W='doze, L=linux/D=DV codec, A=analog video:
suggested suites:
Edit (discreet logic) W/A
Avid (avid) MW/A
Final Cut Pro (Apple) M/DA
Broadcast2000 (Open Source) L/A
Premiere (Adobe) MW/A
If output is for the web, don't bother encoding in your suite. Render uncompressed and large and use something like media cleaner pro to encode while you sleep.
Hardware:
One word...SCSI, RAID if you can
"Let him go, Ralph. He knows what he's doing." --Otto Mann (simpsons)
Just fired it all up this past weekend. I'm not doing anything DV (yet).
o P3 600 Coppermine
o 256MB RAM
o 15G UDMA66 IDE HD, 7200RPM
o U2W SCSI Controller w/ 9 G U2W drive (for capture/playback)
o Pinnacle DC30 Pro
(all on Win98 unfortunately, with premiere 5)
While most of the system is pretty straightforward and inexpensive, the two most important parts are going to cost the most $$$
The SCSI controller and drive are important because you'll want to be capturing your video to it's own device, preferably on it's own controller? Why? You don't want the drive getting bogged up doing stuff like swapping and general system stuff. The faster and wider the better. If I get more $$$ I'll add more drives on the scsi chain....
The DC30 is a dedicated analog in/out board. So far I'm pretty happy with the results. No dropped frames. It ran me around $500 something. Nothing beats 'all-in-hardware', plus I've got the outs for a tv monitor and out-to-tape.
For DV, you're going to need A LOT of FAST disk space, and keep in mind that DV *is* 7**x4** resolution (forget the exact numbers) and you HAVE to capture at that res. at the DV frame rate.
and for back out to DV it's got to stay the same.
Do your research on motherboards, too. You don't want to get a cheap motherboard only to find that it can't hack the throughput.
My $.02
Blech. Signatures.
Needs
Do you just need to edit down some video you have? NTSC video tops out at about 720x480 (that's also the resolution of a vanilla 4:3 DVD). Or perhaps you want to digitize and edit some film at a much higher resolution. Maybe some special effects.
Platform
If you have no limit to your spending, you're going to want the best. Using an Amiga would only be a solution if you're happy with 640x480 video and can afford acceleration boards (if they're still available). Jurassic Park was --not-- done on Amigas. Some of the dinosaur rough-up proof-of-concept animations were done on an Amiga with Lightwave, but all of the final work was done on high-end workstations and edited the old fashioned way on film. Silicon Graphics solutions do exist but will cost you a minimum of $10,000 for software, I am un aware of any freeware packages that with give you anything more than the common cut, paste, and a few overlayed titles and credits. Your best bet is with a Power Macintosh or Windows PC system. Consider spending plenty of money on a good disk subsystem (drives and a controller card) and RAM.
Capture
You need to get the video in there. If you're going to start from scratch, do yourself a favor and get a DV (digital video, Firewire/iLink/IEEE1394) compliant camcorder and a Power Macintosh G4, G3, newer PowerBook G3 or newer iMac DV as well as Apple's new Final Cut Pro software. Many of the pros are using this setup and aside from a minor luminance-clamping issue, it works like a charm and Apple is actually listening to its users.
If you're going to start with an analog source (VHS, Beta, Betacam SP, etc) then you're going to need a damned good capture card and some fast hard drives. Consider a mid-range Miro card, maybe an Avid or even a second-hand Radius if you can find the drivers. PCs and Macs are pretty equal, just be sure to get at least an Ultra/Wide SCSI card and plenty of drives. (maxing out your onboard IDE with 4 x 40 GB 7200 RPM IDE drives may not leave you with enough disk space).
Edting
There are several good software packages out there for editing. Don't look for feature lists or spec sheets, ask around, see what folks are using. Final Cut Pro is getting -A Lot- of users and awards. Many people are dissing Adobe Premiere, but the fact remains that it's still the most popular in its area (but even I will admit that it is aging). There are even plenty of consumer and even some free packages that may do everything you want. These would be fine as long as you don't need some of the higher-end tweaking and quality features, the most important aspect of editing video on a computer is Getting It In There, so spend most of your budget on a good capture system. Or, do yourself a huge favor and go DV, then you won't be digitizing, just transferring.
Bundles
Many camera and video catalogs offer preconfigured Power Macintosh and Windows PC systems, filled with RAM, drives, software, and capture cards or bundled DV camcorders. Some companies like Avid offer decked-out custom jobs with hardware and software for a highly-supported and highly-respected editing suite.
The iMac DV's are nice little self contained systems... Their main drawbacks would be the lack of a second monitor and lack of slots, which limits them to only being able to use only FireWire camera's. iMovie may be lame, but you can buy Adobe Premiere and have a nice, cute little system...
Further up the scale, a Mac G4 couple with a Targa 1000 or 2000 video card would be a great choice for editting, because you've got all the expandability of the G4's, plus the ease of use and plug and play of the Mac... Video capture cards are very finnicky creatures, so it's nice to not have to worry too much about if device 1 will work with device 2 while on motherboard 3.
If you really want to have 3D effects, an NT based system would probably be the way to go, since most of the 3d developers target NT workstation at the low end, and either Solaris or Irix at the high end. Yes, there is some stuff available for the mac (Lightwave, though it lacks the 3rd party plug in support of NT, Infini-D, Electric Image, Strata Studio Pro all ship on the mac... missing from that list is 3D Studio, most notably).
Moving past the low end, you mightt also want to check out systems from Avid and Media 100... They sell turnkey solutions, based on the Mac OS, Windows NT, and Irix.
Without knowing budgets or goals, it's hard to recommend a video editting solution... One thing is, there just aren't any open source tools, or tools that run on the open source operating systems, that can stack up against the proprietary tools.
Lastly... If you end up on a Mac or Windows machine, you'll probably want Adobe Premiere and Adobe After Effects for your editting and compositing. Throw in Photoshop and Illustrator for titling, and you've hit almost $2000 on just software, so be warned it's not at all cheap!
First of all, there is Broadcast 2000, a GPL non-linear editor. For your video capturing needs, try dvgrab (assuming that you've got a IEEE-1394 compliant capture card). And as a cheap plug for my own program, I am the author of gvplay, a simple Gnome/GTK video player. I wrote gvplay to help render my special effect (object replacement through tracking and edge detection).
I have previously used Newtek's Video Toaster Products, so when I started into this I naturally thought of them. I was surprised not to see any mention of their newer VideoToaster NT.
While the original Toaster and the Toaster Flyer are not suited to NLE (non linear editing) the newer Toaster NT is well suited to it.
The system comes with outstanding software, Speedrazor VT and Lightwave VT are the biggies.
There are options that allow you to handle IEEE 1394 in/out.
The big advantage of using a Video Toaster is that your video is handled UNCOMPRESSED. That means, given a digital source, that you will have no quality loss no matter how many generations or layers you use in your projects. You have to step up to very expensive AVID systems to get better quality.
This does come at a price though. You will need a LARGE and FAST disk subsystem capable of handling a sustained transfer rate of 23.4MB/s. You can also plan on about 1.3 GB per minute of video. Medea offers some excellent systems that can meet these needs. I suggest their VideoRaidrt series, which are actually based on IDE DMA drives that'll plug into the external connector of your fast SCSI controller. This makes the drive arrays very affordable. I think you could build a similiar HD array using Linux and an IDE RAID controller, but I don't know how to get it to act as a drive and communicate across the SCSI channel like an ordinary SCSI device. That approach would no doubt save you a pretty penny though.
You will need a fast system, I think a system with two Pentium 3 600 Coppermines is a good start. Look for 256MB RAM or more. You also need a high qualtiy PCI sound card. I am still looking onto those, but you can always start with Soundblaster. I am using a GeForce 256 DDR video card. You could probably use an older card, but I'd urge you to get as nice a video card as you can.
The Toaster itself is about $3000 US dollars, and you can expect to spend about $5,000 US on a system and drives.
You didn't mention camera's. I am using a Canon XL1 for most of my work. The camera has interchangeable lenses and with a converter can use any EF series photographic lens. An XL1 will run you about $3800 US. If I had the budget I'd look at the JVC GY-DV500 which has larger CCD's and uses standard professional video lenses. It also has better low light performance and a more professional look and feel. This means that if you have to hire a cameraman, they'll probably be reasonably familiar with teh camera. It runs about $5,000 US. The lenses are harder to find and more expensive than EF lenses. I plan on using a Canon GL1 as a second unit camera, when my budget allows me to acquire one. ( Of course if my budget allows I'll probably go after the JVC and using the XL1 as a second unit.) All these cameras use MiniDV cassettes and have IEEE 1394 in/out.
That said, I have to forewarn you to remember that you will need to budget for lighting equipment, professional microphones, particularly if you are going to shoot outside on windy days tripods and LAN-C or Control L controllers that will allow you to operate the camera while it is on a tripod. If you are going to try to move the camera I reccomend a steadicam. Also for the XL1 I reccomend using a shoulder mount that will counterbalance the camera as it is "front heavy" with most of its lenses.
Don't post innacurate information
If you do, I swear by my pretty floral bonnet I will end you.
www.desktopvideoworld.com
and
www.matroxusers.com
You'll find a ton of info on these sites - about Pinnacle, Matrox (IE RT1200), and others.
Cheers.
Coolfish
The real problem here is that the posters have never defined what they are doing, and what they want. Are you looking ot do ollywood post-production work? Are you doing a little simple video editing (splicing, soundtrack, and transitions), or are you goign to be creating content on the compouter to interact/overlay on DV video? are you going back to the DV cammera with the work, to a DV storrage array over fiberchannel, making a video-Cd, or goign to be publishing on the web? Who are your customers, and what quality do you expect?
For most people the answer is going to be the simple home movie, publishing back to the cammera, or mabey to the web for short videos. In both cases my recomendation is an iMac DV or Special Edition, mabey replacing the Hd with a larger one. This gives you a quality computer with enough horsepower to work on video, built-in OS supported FireWire (1384), and a great consumer level editing package (iMovie.. i have given 2 hour courses on its use, and it is simple to learn, and very powerful for the usual stuff, I highly recomend it for most uses). I would recomend having someone demo iMovie for you once, as it is a great piece of comsumer level software! the size of te Hd is a consideration, but not as big a one as you might imagine, as most of the time you are not woring on more than 20 minutes of video, and you just toss stuff back onto the cammera when you are done, if you are going to be doing hours of video at a time, get a profesional system...
On the next level of stuff.. TV broadcast quality work, I would recomend a G4, a Cannon XL-1, and either Apple's Final Cut Pro (my personal recomendation), or Adobe Premere, and a copy of Media Cleaner Pro, oh and a copy of Apple's QuickTime Pro (the best value tool you will find out there!). If you really feel that portablility is important (say to cut together a news clip while you are russing back to the station in the van), the new FireWire powerbook can serve as a nice little mobile station. Incidentally, this seems to be the combination that ABC has chosen to send it's teams into the field with.
And the final level that I am going to be talking about, the high end content creation level: Here I would go with a a G4 or a SGI (depending on what your company is better at supporting) decked out with a Arora or Avid card (top end is $10,000+ a card), a Gig-and-a-half of memor (remebering of course to get 2-2-2 memory), a fibrecannel Gigabit interface, Dual Channel SCSI-160 (one for scratch, 10K RPM of course), and maybe one of those nice quad-processor digital co-processor cards (4 G3's on a card... not real multi-processing, but even better fo DSP stuff...).
Hope this helps someone out there, and if anyone is in the Madison, Wi area, I am more than willing to do short demo's of the lower end products mentioned (I am not a salesman...). I do have a pro-mac bais, and in this case that is really where the professionals are going, so the bais is justified.
There are a couple of relevant articles on MacCentral today. Check them out: http://maccentral.com/news/0004/ 10.apple2.shtml and http://maccentral.com/news/000 4/10.finalcut.shtml .
The first one is a summary of an announcement made by Apple, Matrox, and Pinnacle Systems concerning a new "Macintosh Only" uncompressed standard-definition (SD) and uncompressed high-definition (HD) video solutions. The second article describe the latest release of FInal Cut Pro.
IEEE1394 gives you isochronus transfer mode an the ability for two devices, say a iLink digital camcorder and a 1394 harddrive to communicate directly without lugging a computer around with you. Alternatively, the new Powerbooks have IEEE built in.
In any case, the isochronus transfer keeps you from dropping frames as even the fastest of asynchronous busses like SCSI can. It locks down a guaranteed bandwidth for devices that need it(and DV devices are the classic example of somethign that needs a certain amount of guaranteed bandwidth), so no spike in bus usage can lose you a frame that you can never get back.
The device-to-device communication is nice for keeping things light, but apparently not absolutely necessary when you consider laptops are not that bad to work with.
-N
I am the one true god. However, as an atheist, I don't believe in myself. I guess I have a self-esteem problem.
Okay, so it has a pricetag the average consumer might poop themselves over, but it's worth every penny. I produce medium length (5-20 minute) videos for local campus groups at my university, and I've found that if you've got the cash to shell out for the camera ($1000 and UP!) you can afford a system to go with hit. Primary examples would include ProMax Technologies setups complete for a beginner or some guy with a pro-based background. No, there's not much out there in terms of PC stuff, not unless you want to drop $30k on a system. Granted, a G4 system may run up to $20k, but that will include a WHOLE lot of stuff that's worth your while.
Now while Digital Video is just a fledgling industry, there are some great sites to check out. I highly recommend the 2-pop.com site for questions about ANYTHING related to DV. Another good reference point is ProMax . Don't forget the Apple site for their software (FCP is WAY better than iMovie.
So there I was. Naked. In a refrigerator. With a potroast on my knees. Smokin a cigar. That's when it got REALLY weird.