The Truth about DV
The Truth about DV- special effects and filmmaking
Well, put my startup kit to work this weekend, and well I've pretty much found what I expected. I wanted to test for myself the science and tech behind it compare to the real results, so I conducted this test.
For the test I setup a P2 400, 128MB PC100 SDRAM, IBM Deskstar 22GB 2MB Cache/7200 RPM UDMA/66, ATI Rage 16 MB AGP, and Pyro DV. The camera is a Sony Digital8 TRV103. Here are my results:
- No dropped frames, not one capture in over 40 tests had a single dropped frame.
- No image quality loss from the original tape to the final output, 550 lines in, 550 lines out. Infact the final output looked brighter and cleaner because I did a little tweaking with AfterEffects before I output it.
- No buggy behaviour, no capture corruption, nothing. I did captures ranging from 20 seconds to 10 mins long.
The Pyro DV is a $99 DV Capture board (I picked mine up through pricewatch.com for $59.99)
My conclusion? The DV capture market is pretty much a scam. RAID setups for capture is unnecessary as well, you only need a sustained rate of 5MB/s, anything more in unnecessary unless you just want faster way to preview and render the final product.
For live broadcast or real-time editing you'd have to get another board however. But none of us are really interested in that at this point anyway. For our needs, I don't see any reason what so ever (even if you own a Sony DSR-200A or even higher end pro camera) to require a better capture card for your editing needs.
Here's why, first it's simply a digital stream both ways, secondly, your camera plays back at a rate equivelent to 5MB/s a sec which means as long as your hard drive can sustain that rate, it will keep up with the capturing without a problem of any DV or Digital8 Camera or even playback deck. The reason some of you are finding dropped frames is not because of the capturing process but because data drop on the tape. Since the tape is magnetic media it can suffer data loss from a bad recording, even if it looks perfect on the tape, there can be dropped digital data vital to the capture process. My recommendation is to use Metal Evaporate Tapes. The Metal Particulate tapes can occassionally garble data in a frame, which is equivelent to a frame drop. Your problems will not be related to your hard drive or capture card unless they are pre-UDMA/33 drives with less than a 5MB/s sustained.
Some cards have a small cache which allows them to work with slower drives as well as deal with garbled frames, but in general you won't need that if you have a decent hard drive and use Metal Evaporated Tapes. IEEE 1394 and Firewire are just communication ports, they are the connection between devices. Many DV capture card manufacturers claim in their FAQS that some older OHCI compliant cards supposidly are inferior to their cards and give some bogus or irrelevent reason to why, but there is no technical/scientific proof to a word they say. So ignore that marketing crap whenever you hear it. Any proper IEEE 1394/Firewire compliant communication port will produce flawless DV quality both ways with a software package which properly supports it.
DV is finally available to us at a consumer level, and all you need is a simple Firewire card such as the Pyro DV. $99 firewire card, UDMA33/66 Support, and a fairly decent size UDMA33/66 drive at 7200 RPM and you've got yourself broadcast quality captured video, just add the software package and you are ready to go.
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Ghent
Endor Productions, Inc.
the pyro card sucks, dont buy it. it doesnt work with premiere, etc. Get a better card, youll be more happy
Not everyone can afford premier. VideoStudio 4.0 and Media Studio Pro 6.0 VE is fine for those who can't afford it. Software package shouldn't have anything to do with your choice so saying it sucks is really being ignorent. It even includes a 6 foot DV cable, that alone is worth $70. It's worth more than 3 times it's retail price. You cannot find a better value and quality in one package.
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Ghent
Endor Productions, Inc.
i pretty much agree with Ghent_ep, here. So the card can't be used (yet) to capture directly from Premiere; so what? Capture your clips first and then take 'em to Premiere.
Ghent_ep, I noticed one thing you didn't mention was errors that are less serious than dropped frames. DV doesn't have error correction, it has error concealment. You can try it yourself, grab the same clip over and over and then use a difference filter, and you'll see that you don't always get exactly the same signal. My guess is that this is happening at the tape head, but it's just possible that noise on the card might play a part. It's a VERY minor thing though - the error concealment is so good that even when you can see the difference, it's usually impossible to tell which one is the bad one.
I bought IntroDV, it's the card and fire wire , every now and then one frame will
drop in short or long captures. It came with software that is plenty good enough for
basic editing and adding titles and it has a variety of royatly-free music tracks.You
can capture still photos too. It's everything you need to capture and edit TV quality
movies as they claim. The capture window provides frame-accurate camera control.
It's easy to bring from the camera drag drop the clips where you want them, cut the
scenes, add music, sound effects, and has some great transitions. You can use
Quicktime pro "included" to create web movies or video E-mail. I enjoy using it it's a
breeze to be able to find what you want in a snap and drag a production into place
with such ease. it comes with PhotoDV and digital darkroom for editing still shots.
You can preview your project on an LCD or TV monitor, or even insert still images
into your film for a dramatic look. Allot of what I typed here was strait from the
IntroDV box
but it's all true. It's set up to story board your project in the library window and drag and drop the clips into the storyline and your ready to preview.
Well I have said enough about IntroDV I already sound like a salesman for it, LOL
Just a little FYI about the Pyro card. Adobe has promised that it will be supported in ver 6 and the makers of the pyro card and adobe are woking on (may be already out) a utility to allow the card to operate in premiere.
Im not saying that because I have one, Im probably going for the DV200 but for the price of the Pyro, and since it is digital, it is a great card for people on a budget or alot of people on this board since I've noticed there is alot of young people here.
I agree that most cheaper hardware will work just fine in the place of more expensive brand names. BUT if you need compatibility, proven reliability, and good technical support than sometimes the more expensive stuff is better.
For example- let's say you have a home LAN and you decide on getting the $15 NIC instead of the name brand $50 one. You bring it home and it doesn't work quite right but after a bit of tweaking and work, it ends up working all right. Now let's say you are an IS manager that has 200 computers that need a NIC. Now there is no way you are going to go through 200 computers to get a cheap NIC card working. So you just buy the non-generic card that has been repeatedly tested and updated.
heh, yeah but that has nothing to do with us. These are single machines, and all that matters is that they work. Hence the name "Low Budget Special Effects", so name brand relevency means nothing. And there are many cases when smaller companies with discount packages offer better support than many larger companies. But yes if someone else was paying the money and wanted the best name and support, I would grab something better. IE: As a network Engineer for contract I always just purchase 3Com's without even really giving the option to go with cheaper cost Linksys, mainly because they just don't care and have the money to throw around, so I just flip it on their bill and do the drill. If they're on a budget like many of us here, I tell them the honest truth that they could work on lower-end cost cards and get the same results. It's more work for me and for them, but money isn't something we can throw around for some namebrand that offers nothing new and can sometimes be inferior to the no-name brands.
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Ghent
Endor Productions, Inc.
What you pay for when you buy a 700+ $ card is (a) REAL TIME (b) Analog and Digital and (c) HIGH QUALITY plug-ins with FEATURES and bundled software!
Ale
Yeappers, although there are few companies scummy enough to market regular capture only Firewire cards at $700. Ah well, people seem to have money growing on trees these days.
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Ghent
Endor Productions, Inc.
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