A1Burokas@aol.com
Mon, 21 Jun 1999 10:10:30 EDT
To the many interested parties...
In preparation for a seminar at Macworld that I'll be giving next month,
I've had an opportunity to test the new Ratoc Firewire DV card on a G3 Series
98 PowerBook. This is the second generation 98 Powerbook, but it still has
the slowest processor and lowest backside cache: 233 Mhz and 512k. In
addition, I did not yet specially configure my computer for doing digitial
video. I've got my internet, IR, and other extensions and control panels
running. Plus, I got a little bug with a recent hard drive change which I
think may be hardware related, and this continued throughout the test.
Given all this, I was able to control a Sony WV-10,000 DV deck from
Japan and set my clips for capture. I didn't configure any software or
hardware. Just plugged it in. But soon, somehow, the deck stopped listening
to the computer. As the manual and deck labels are in Japanese, I felt it
would be simpler to move to an American electronic appliance.
So I got out my new TRV-900. The PowerBook recognized it via Firewire
and not only controlled, but captured the video with no dropped frames to the
internal HD (already 2/3 full with other stuff).
I messed around with the clips in a copy of Final Cut Pro I've borrowed
to test the card. I added a title, and two wipes. Playback through the
camcorder and the DV deck looked great. Only suffering stopage with an alert
about dropped frames during the title I added. The rest of the video played
fine. Total running time was about three minutes.
The Ratoc card consists of a PC card (cardbus), a dongle with both a
6-pin and a 4-pin IEEE-1394 jacks. Powered Firewire draws more power than the
PC card slot can provide, or can be drawn from the computer's USB or ADB
port. So to provide power to external Firewire HDs, you have to use an
adaptor. Ratoc has a power adaptor and a jack in the end of the dongle to
receive power from the adaptor and provide it down the 6-pin firewire port.
This will provide power to whatever Firewire device you have, but no matter
if it's a VST Firewire drive AC adaptor or the Ratoc one, it's an extra plug
and cable.
Without the power the 6-pin jack acts like a 4-pin so you have two
firewire ports on one dongle. The Newer Technology card only provides one
unpowered 6-pin port and has no options for powering. If you are using a
PowerBook in a regular place then it may just be easier to power the dongle
and swap Firewire drives with just one cable.
The Ratoc Firewire PC card system also includes a short and
to-the-point manual and a CD with the few extra pieces of software needed to
use the card with QuickTime 4.0 and OS 8.6. In fact, the OS upgrade took me
about 10 minutes, the QT 4.0 upgrade too me about 10 minutes on a 56k dialup
and a full install (6+ MB) and the Ratoc install took under a minute.
So from completely outdated to capturing DV in under a half hour. I'm
impressed. Now if I had a PowerBook with a processor that was actually fast
enough to do this right, and a hard drive that worked better- like a big fast
expansion bay HD, and a DV deck with an english manual, I bet I'd be able to
get this stuff to work. ... okay, work better. :)
Anthony
________
Anthony Burokas, Media Technician, IEBA Productions, Inc., Phila. PA
+ Event Video + Corporate Video + Broadcast Television Production +
V: (215) 632-3283 + Fax: (215) 612-0663
Go to: <A HREF="http://ieba.com">IEBA.com</A> to find out more.
"Ok, so what's the speed of dark?"
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b3 on Mon Jun 21 1999 - 07:15:32 PDT