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2)
PC or Mac? PCs were getting a lot better, but many kept on saying
that Macs are the ONLY way to go. I like Macs, think they are
great computers, but most of the time, I use a PC, simply because
it is cheaper. Since I already had investments in PC software,
and because PCs were generally cheaper and more available, I decided
to take the gamble and go with a PC. There were several DV solutions
available for a PC. Also, Promise
Technologies had a FastTrak card that allowed you to create a
RAID 0 array with UDMA disks which sounded very promising. At
the time, imagine putting 4 16.8G drives into a computer with fast
trak for about $1600 when one SCSI 10,000 RPM 9Gig drive was $900!You
supposedly can put up to 2 fast traks in a computer so you can get
8 drives total, plus if you have any spare IDE spaces, you can use
those too.
Maxtor currently has 40Gig drives that can be found for under $8/gig and IBM has a 37G drive also under $9/gig (November 1999) ... imagine ... 8x40Gig = 320Gigs of cheap UDMA drives ... perfect for doing DV NLE that can hold 24 hours of video ... unreal! (Though there may be size limitations with the PromiseFast Trak... see their Web site).
3) What DV system was I going to get? There were several PC solutions to choose from. Pinnacle's DV300, DPS Spark, Adaptec 8945 Hot Connect, Radius MotoDV(now Digital Origin), Truevision DV2000 (now Pinnacle), Fast DVMaster, and Canopus DVRex and DVRaptor. I went to the DV Expo in Pasadena in October, '98 and saw all of them. To make a long story sort of short, I fell in love with the DVRex ... although the price tag was a bit pricey for me ... but the analog inputs were a "must have" if I was going to edit a lot of analog footage. My second choice was the Radius' (now Digital Origin) MotoDV Studio. Radius just announced an upgrade that would include Batch capture and device control from Premiere, and also included PhotoDV. Truevision was an "economical" bundle of MotoDV but it lacked the "pro" features. The DVRaptor looked pretty cool, especially since it had tape logging and the "video overlay" feature built onto the card, but it was new and I didn't want to be the first kid on the block to try the Raptor. So, I decided to go with the DVRex, although I hadn't purchased it yet, thinking that I wouldn't really start using it until the beginning of 1999.
4) After subscribing to the Edit DV list and the DV-L list and reading rec.video.desktop, I read many many messages discussing the pro and cons of so many things. I asked people if my TRV9 that I purchased back in June would somehow "transcode" analog to DV on the fly. The TRV9 can record analog to DV directly to tape, but I was hoping that someone would know a "back door" to allow the TRV9 to take an analog signal and pass it directly to the 1394 port. no luck. Then one day in the middle of November, Jim Akiba told me on the DV-L list about the Sony DVMC-DA1 that he was about to export to the US from Japan... a device that would do exactly that ... transcode between analog and digital ON THE FLY for less then $300! This was so new that no one, including Jim had actually had a chance to try it out with any of the DV systems, but theoretically, it should work, just like using a camcorder in camera mode rather then Video tape mode. So a Sony DVMC-DA1 and MotoDV Studio combination seemed like a cost effective alternative to the very elegant DVRex (I still think the Rex is great, and if I were edit for money, I'd get the Rex instead). Time to buy!
- MotoDV Studio
- Optiquest V95 19" Monitor
Outpost had the original MotoDV Studio and free shipping. Radius said I could upgrade to 2.0 for $20. Cha ching. Cyberian Outpost also had the Optiquest V95 19" monitor. The monitor got good reviews, and though not the cheapest price on net, Outpost had free shipping... Cha ching! Ordered it all Friday night.