Monday, November 05, 2001

When video hardware goes bad: Mix magazine -- normally dedicated to pro audio production -- has a two-article series on one audio producer's trials and errors with digital video editing. He compares it to the early days of digital audio production--10 years ago or so--when simple things like sync and hearing real time effects were fiction. The product this author was using was Edit DV and Cinestream--two products which have bumped between at least 3 different corporate owners in the last 4 years. This guy's experience reminds me a lot of using Adobe Premiere 5.1a a couple of years ago to edit DV, on both Mac OS 8.6 and Windows NT. Although I got more consistent results than what this article recounts, nonetheless editing a project and printing it to video was a glitch and multiple-reboot ridden process. When video hardware goes good: Since upgrading to Premiere 6.0 running under Windows 2000 and Mac OS 9.1 things have been much smoother, due in large part to the very stable Canopus DV-Rex hardware platform. Although not super-cheap, it's great hardware that more than makes up for the cost in being hassle-free. Just last month I finally was able to order the real-time (RT) option card which speeds up my rendering times greatly. Transitions and picture corrections that could take minutes to hours to render now happen in real time, allowing me to play a good copy of the project to VHS tape in real time. The importance of a good, solid hardware base: Lately I've talked to a couple of folks on the University of Illinois campus (where I work and school) who want to get into video editing for streaming or DVD production. What I've found is that the iMovie myth of video editing being a simple plug-and-play enterprise is pervasive. All the more pervasive is folks putting lots of emphasis on getting the best camcorder at the expense of editing hardware. Don't get me wrong -- getting a good picture during shooting is critical -- you can't polish a turd. At the same time, even a $1000 DV cam can produce a great picture if you know how to use it -- better than a $3000 cam in the hands of a novice. But what good is that excellent picture quality if you can't get it edited into a final piece without aging 100 years in the process? The best advice I give people is to remember that you're still using comptuers, and so you want to have the best computer you can afford. Hard drives can be your best friend or worst enemy -- buy the best and biggest you can afford. It looks like IDE based RAIDs of ATA 100 hard drives are working well for video, but if you really want to be secure you can't get much better than a nice SCSI Video RAID as made by Medea. It's cheap (for SCSI) and plug-and-play -- no configuration necessary. With processor power and memory so cheap these days it doesn't seem as though anyone's skimping on these so much anymore, although just a year or two ago I was surprised at how many folks were trying edit video with just 64 megs. Just today a colleague was telling me about a shop on campus trying to edit DV using a basic off-the-shelf Dell equipped with just one system drive and a $50 IEEE1394 (Firewire) card. Apparently they're experiencing lots of problems with dropped frames and crashes. That's not a surprise -- even a quick upgrade of an additional hard drive would probably cut down on problems significantly. I don't mean to scare people off from DV editing, but if you want good results you need to be aware of the basics and have a healthy respect for what a complex process digital video editing is. If all you want to do is cut a few 3 minute Quicktimes of home movies or simple videos, then you'll probably do OK with just an iMac and iMovie or an off-the-shelf PC with firewire input and one big hard drive. But once you want to add effects, transitions and complex titles, do not doubt -- you will crash. (Luckily, for iMovie users, the software is limited so that it really won't allow you to do things the system can't keep up with. But with other editing software you may not be so lucky). Starting simple and cheap is a great way to learn and I would never want to discourage anyone from going that route to start. In the real world it's a waste to blow $10k on computer editing equipment only to find out that you don't have the time or inclination to really get into it. But if you're sure you want to do it, or you're thinking of doing it professionally, then you'll save yourself a lot of headaches by not screwing around.
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