Charles F. McConathy (mcconathy@mail.netus.com)
Sat, 19 Jun 99 21:44:45 +0100
Dr Nathan Scott:
I think you will do better in the Biege G3 with EIDE storage and a simple
1394 card provided you have the drivers. Visit our web site and check out
FireMAX-C card with Premiere.
>Dear Dig-vid,
>
>I've been struggling towards a semi-professional setup for many years now.
>All along I've had visions of doing high-quality digital video editing but
>it has eluded me so far. Here's a history:
>
>I bought a Quadra 840AV which did 320 x 240 pixels at 15 FPS - not bad for
>1993 straight out of the box. Did some ray-traced animation and made a
>small promotional movie with Adobe Premiere 4.2.
>
>Then in 1998 I bought a beige G3 tower with the built-in AV. To my
>annoyance it was actually a less powerful video grabber than the 840AV! So
>I also bought a MiroMotion DC30+, thinking, "now I've got everything".
>
>The MiroMotion card was actually pretty good and for the first time I could
>at least read and write a decent PAL signal (i.e. 768 x 576 at 25 FPS). But
>again I was frustrated because it soon turned out that the hard disk in the
>Mac was only capable of a sustained data transfer rate of about 1.2 Mb/s.
>This is not enough for high-quality work and the movie ends up with
>noticeable artifacts.
>
>Then a friend gave me a spare FireWire card to try in my trusty beige G3. I
>connected up a lovely new XL1 but was horrified with the quality of the
>image captured this way - even worse than using the analog MiroMotion card
>to capture the same image. Of course the same hard disk limitation was
>getting me for the same reason.
>
>So I am just about to buy an Adaptec 2940UW SCSI controller and an 18Gb IBM
>Hammerhead disk to put inside my Mac. This pair is rated at 80 Mb/s burst
>rate. The best advice I can get about this is that I can expect an actual
>sustained data rate of about 30 Mb/s. This is much greater than the 8Mb/s
>that the MiroMotion card can produce and it is also greater than the 4Mb/s
>I expect the XL1 to produce. Therefore, in theory at least, THIS should be
>an awesome combination.
>
>If any of you are still with me, here are the questions:
>1) If there is anything wrong with this plan, I would really like to know
>about it NOW. If past experience is any guide, I will get the controller
>and hard disk working and THEN someone will tell me that - of course - I
>need XYZ additional hardware to edit a good-looking movie. In short, is
>there some other bottleneck or harware limitation I will discover? Or will
>it finally just work?
>
>2) I hear that Adaptec are now producing a cool new "combo" FireWire/SCSI
>controller card, the 8945
>http://www.adaptec.com/products/overview/aha8945hc.html
>HOWEVER it is only rated at 40 Mb/s. So again I need advice: when actually
>editing, will I notice a real difference between a card/disk pair rated at
>40Mb/s and a card/disk pair rated at 80 Mb/s? Is there any performance
>penalty for having the FireWire on a separate card from the SCSI
>controller? This is an important question because I would prefer not to use
>up two slots when I might be able to get away with just one. BUT I also
>want a swift editor.
>
>3) There is a new choice out there: the FireWire drive! The only one I can
>find is
>http://www.firepower.com/products/FireDrive.html
>So - does anyone have one of these, and does it work for DV? I note that
>the sustained transfer rate of the largest of these drives is given as "13
>to 8" Mb/s. What does that mean? Does it mean they will promise me 13 and
>deliver 8? Or should I divide every number in two to make it realistic?
>
>I hope this story will help anyone who is just starting. The message is,
>don't expect anyone, even Apple, to sell you a desktop computer that REALLY
>edits video straight out of the box. I am fairly certain this applies even
>to the otherwise appetising blue/white G3. You MUST also buy additional
>harware to eliminate the bottleneck of the relatively slow built-in hard
>disk and controller. If I am wrong here I hope someone will correct me.
>
>Regards,
>
>
>
>Dr Nathan Scott
>Lecturer
>Department of Mechanical & Materials Engineering
>The University of Western Australia
>Western Australia 6907
>Rm 220 +61 8 9380 3761
>FAX +61 8 9380 1024
>Home +61 8 9440 0242
>nscott@mech.uwa.edu.au
>http://www.mech.uwa.edu.au/dynamics/
Thanks,
Charles F. McConathy, President, ProMax Systems, Inc.,
16 Technology Drive #106 - Irvine, Calif. 92618
Macintosh DV Video Turnkey Editing Systems and Data Storage Specialist
Sales: 1-800-977-6629 - 949-727-3977 - FAX: 949-727-3546
Web Site: http://www.promax.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b3 on Sat Jun 19 1999 - 21:48:08 PDT