| T |
oday's
PCs and Macs have enough horsepower to edit video in the digital realm
and add special effects and other visual excitement. With the proliferation
of inexpensive digital video camcorders and the IEEE 1394 standard,
it is getting easier to transfer your digital video to your computer
for editing. The DV format has brought a lot of benefits to the video
editor; high quality images, no image loss during the transfer process,
and the wealth of hardware and software that is available to take advantage
of DV.
Enter the IEEE 1394 card
Today's
IEEE 1394-based video cards come complete with editing software and
the "FireWire" necessary to connect your DV camera to your
desktop. Things have gotten easier than from just a few years ago.
In this buyer's guide, we provide you with information about sub-$1,300
FireWire editing systems (IEEE 1394 card and video editing software)
There is a potentially huge market for these cards, from institutional
and educational, to wedding and event videographers. As the market continues
to grow, and the price of the DV cameras continue to fall, it won't
be too long when we'll regularly see a FireWire interface built into
every desktop PC. There is no better time than now to fire up that DV
camcorder, your PC or Mac and start acquiring and editing DV footage.
Most manufacturers of FireWire based digital video acquisition cards include all the necessary cables and drivers to get you up and running. FireWire uses either 4 pin or 6 pin connections. The four pin is for device connection without power while the six pin is for powered device connection. Most desk top devices are configured with 6 pins to supply power should your device require it. FireWire based DV cameras feature 4-pin connections. So the cable that comes with your card should be a 4-pin to 6-pin FireWire connection.
So what do you buy?
If you are a Mac user, you are lucky. The Mac is built by one manufacturer
and therefore the FireWire card vendors only have to build in compatibility
from one manufacturer. And with the new Power Mac G4, FireWire is built
in. You can probably get away with just buying the editing software.
If you are a Windows PC user, things are different. The only systems
available with built in FireWire include select Compaq models and systems
from Sony (which calls it i.Link). Installing a FireWire card in your
systems can be a relatively painless process or it can be an ordeal.
Have you heard how hard it is to configure and get an editing system
up and running on the PC? Well a lot of the frustration has to do with
not doing your homework first. Because of the disparities between computer
manufacturers, hard drives, graphics displays, motherboards et. al,
on the Windows side, gremlins can and do arise. There are support FAQs
on virtually all the cards in this buyer's guide located on the Internet,
either directly on the vendor websites or in the newsgroups that abound
dedicated to digital video. (such as rec.video). While one card from
one manufacturer may install flawlessly on system A, it may not even
work on system B, even though system A and B are built by the same manufacturer.
It is imperative that you visit these manufacturers websites to determine
if your current workstation can accommodate the DV IEEE 1394 system
that they sell. One of the biggest issues with configuring your own
DV editing system with these cards is compatibility. Knowledge is power:
Do your research before you buy.
You
want to edit video, where do you store all that video?
For video, the ideal hard drive is the fastest one that you can afford. Seriously, just a few years ago, SCSI and its flavors was the only way to go, and the faster the drive spinned, the better for capturing video without dropping frames. But SCSI is more expensive relative to Ultra DMA. For those of you getting into digital video editing, I suggest a minimum 9GB hard drive, either Ultra DMA or SCSI, spinning at a minimum of 7200rpm. This should be a dedicated drive. You system and application software should be on a another drive and not where your system is located. If you are on the Mac, check out the new FireWire hard drives from companies like VST Technologies. You also might want to check out some of the offerings from Medea Corp. It offers a range of VideoRAID arrays based on Ultra DMA hard drives starting at around $700.
Digital Video gobbles up massive amounts of disk space, about 1GB of disk space stores just under five minutes of digital video. The final output of your video should be a deciding factor in what kind of storage technology you should buy. The higher the quality the video, the more storage is required.
Check out the accompanying charts detailing some of the specs of the latest IEEE 1394 video cards. We'll be updating it when new cards hit the market, so check back often.--John Virata