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Author Topic: Camcorders Bobby Henderson "Ask me about Trajan." Posts: 10973 From: Lawton, OK, USA Registered: Apr 2001 posted 01-11-2003 11:04 AM                     Greg, I'm glad to hear you're happy with your Firewire card, camera and software. Consumer video editing is sure to be a "killer app" for driving a lot of new computer sales (that is if the boneheads at Intel and various PC companies will wake up and stop hyping the Internet instead). You'll want to get a copy of Adobe After Effects to go with your Premiere installation. After Effects is like having a very powerful animated version of Photoshop (and more). What I'm wanting to do in video production is more on the "industrial" or semi-professional end, which the low cost MiniDV cameras and software don't quite address. If I can at least burn well-produced DVDs on my own that would help in getting the extra investment capital needed to get a full suite of equipment (at least two cameras, good sound gear, etc.). But the DVD-R situation is really murky right now. A growing number of my graphics customers are asking about getting video work done and burned to DVD. There's a ton of potential there, especially with applications like Apple's Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio Pro. The hangup is I can't rightly charge customers the money I want if the DVDs themselves are going to have glitches. And if I want to get a sizeable bank loan for buying real professional level video gear and more powerful RAID-equipped workstations, they're going to want to see some good results up front.  |  IP: Logged Paul Linfesty Phenomenal Film Handler Posts: 1383 From: Bakersfield, CA, USA Registered: Nov 1999 posted 01-11-2003 12:48 PM                     Can Premiere work well from a single hard drive based PC? My work system has seperate drives for video storage and applications, but I was interested in setting up a (less costly, i.e. cheap) system on my home computer.  |  IP: Logged Greg Mueller Phenomenal Film Handler Posts: 1687 From: Port Gamble, WA Registered: Jun 99 posted 01-11-2003 01:01 PM                        My friend is bringing over a DVD he burned himself on his new HP DVD (USB) burner. We'll try his dvd out tonight on my Q50 player and see if it plays at my house. I have a WD 120 gig HD that I'm using to store DV files on, it's the second drive on the system. So far so good. It will be real interesting to see how all this equipment and software does or doesn't work together, in the next week or so. My friend is going to let me borrow his DVD burner after I do the editing and we'll see how it all goes. All this for tapes of the vacation...  |  IP: Logged Bobby Henderson "Ask me about Trajan." Posts: 10973 From: Lawton, OK, USA Registered: Apr 2001 posted 01-11-2003 09:25 PM                     I think the problem with single, large IDE drives is an issue of wear and tear. At least that is my opinion. I've killed a few IDE drives as a result of editing giant-sized Photoshop layouts. Video streams of any significant length would pretty much make the same performance demands. Ordinary IDE drives are only made for casual computing. I suppose one would be okay doing video edit/renderings in Premiere and After Effects to a single drive if that is all they are doing. It would be asking a bit much to have other junk happening in the background. RAID is much more reliable. You have greater data throughput, redundancy and the separate-but-linked hard discs are treated a bit more kindly. Most production houses equip their posting suites with RAID mainly from a time/dollars standpoint. You will get many more edits and renderings made to a RAID system in the same amount of time as a single IDE or single SCSI drive. In time, either the computing industry will make RAID a standard item in new computers or improve the designs of single hard disc drives to withstand more brutal performance demands. NLE video is on the way, as is other things like much more demanding 3D gaming, video/audio playback and other sensory overload stuff. Hard discs are still in the dark ages in terms of design and need some drastic improvement to keep pace with changes happening in all other levels of hardware.  |  IP: Logged Paul Linfesty Phenomenal Film Handler Posts: 1383 From: Bakersfield, CA, USA Registered: Nov 1999 posted 01-11-2003 10:06 PM                     Thanks, Bobby. That was one of the things that bothered me with IT people at work claiming I didnt need all my hard drives at work because they knew people with editing systems on their home computers. WHat I REALLY want is a G-4 with Final Cut Pro. My new boss has asked why we don't have one!  |  IP: Logged Greg Mueller Phenomenal Film Handler Posts: 1687 From: Port Gamble, WA Registered: Jun 99 posted 01-12-2003 12:07 PM                        My friend came over with his home made DVD last night and we played it on my system. It worked flawlessly. It was like watching first generation mini-DV tape. I was mistaken when I said the HP DVD burner is an USB unit it's really a Firewire unit. We both feel it would be better to have an internal unit, for file transfer speed if nothing else. We're also confused about how they get two hours worth of movie on a single disk, as the best we can figure on is one hour. We're both pretty happy with the prospects of this equipment. Processor speed, large amounts of ram, a large HD and a fast display card will make the system...we think. Probably a Motorola based system would be better than an Intel based system, but for the home, we're pretty impressed  |  IP: Logged David Stambaugh Film God Posts: 4021 From: Eugene, Oregon Registered: Jan 2002 posted 01-12-2003 12:41 PM                        Most recent DVD releases seem to be dual-layer, which doubles their data capacity (and thus reduces the need for really severe MPEG compression). Current-generation writeable DVD media is single-layer only, so less capacity.  |  IP: Logged Greg Mueller Phenomenal Film Handler Posts: 1687 From: Port Gamble, WA Registered: Jun 99 posted 01-12-2003 02:28 PM                        Thanks David. We were wondering if it were a hardware issue or a software one. I guess the future may not quite be here, but close  |  IP: Logged Bobby Henderson "Ask me about Trajan." Posts: 10973 From: Lawton, OK, USA Registered: Apr 2001 posted 01-12-2003 03:57 PM                     Professional level DVD authoring software is going to provide more options to the person doing the encoding work. But even still, I cannot help but wonder if companies like Sony are not writing their own proprietary encoding programs and doing other software tweaks in getting the best balance of compression/image quality. Regular DVD authoring apps tend to give you a flat setting for a lot of what you're trying to encode. Well, that's my theory on why movies on DVD seem to fit a lot more data into the same space.  |  IP: Logged Steve Kraus Film God Posts: 4094 From: Chicago, IL, USA Registered: May 2000 posted 01-13-2003 12:04 AM                    They're using variable bit rate encoding which is achieved with two or three passes over the material and perhap a bit of human input as well to create a bit stream that varies dynamically over the run of the program. Unless you can do that you won't be able to be as efficent. I have a booklet on DVD mastering that a post house put out and that's how they describe the process.  |  IP: Logged Paul Linfesty Phenomenal Film Handler Posts: 1383 From: Bakersfield, CA, USA Registered: Nov 1999 posted 01-21-2003 05:00 PM                     And coming soon to a consumer retailer near you: Top Story JVC Offers Consumer HDTV Camcorder Sometime soon, at a camera store near you...consumer HD camcorders from JVC? That's right. A January 15th release from JVC Company of America (that's the consumer, not pro side of the company) spots the highly-capable camcorder as ideal for that everyday user -- or at least those that can afford those fancy home HD theater systems. "Now the consumers that have invested in HD display devices can create their own HD content, worthy of the display it is being shown on," says Jerry Barbera, vice president, consumer video at JVC. The camcorder was initially announced last August at CEATEC Japan, a consumer show. Expected to price under $3,000, the camcorder records both 720p and 480p in a native 16:9 format. The cassette holds specially formulated but otherwise standard miniDV tape. The 480i recording employs standard DV compression. Playback at 480i integrates with 4:3 NTSC displays, but the camcorder also turns out 480p, 720p, and 1080i. JVC will offer Firewire and component video out for monitor hookup. Nothing more specific was available at press time, but a JVC spokesman said a more detailed announcement is coming January 22nd, the day after this newsletter hits the wires. The camera, which comes out later this year, would be a boon to everyone who's bumped up against the limits of the 480 interlaced image. This announcement is another example that JVC doesn't plan to take a back seat in the HD world to come. Last April, Cortland, New York-based Photon Vision Systems announced that JVC would integrate Photon's unique 8.3 million pixel CMOS QuadHDTV sensors into a hi res camera under development. The JVC Ultra High Definition TV camera, said Photon, would include three of the CMOS chips to deliver a resolution of 3840 x 2160 pixels. Expect an interesting NAB 2003.  |  IP: Logged

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