It looks
so easy. Shoot some footage on a camcorder,
plug it into a PC and capture the footage, then
simply drag-and-drop your way to producing a
Sundance or Oscar winning masterpiece.
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| A well constructed video editing
system can save you frustration further
down the track. |
Thanks to faster PCs, better standards
(such as IEEE 1394/FireWire), exceptional performance
improvements in capture cards and editing software,
digital video has gone mainstream.
To a great extent, the digital video format is
driving the video-editing boom. Boasting 720 x
576-pixel resolution, 24-bit colour, full-motion
interlaced video, and 12-bit or 16-bit stereo
audio, DVs video quality is superior to analog
formats; and you can transfer video directly to
the hard drive.
SETTING UP A DESKTOP VIDEO
SYSTEM
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| Storage solutions now include the
increasingly affordable DVD recording option. |
The first criteria in setting up a DV
desktop video system is ensuring you have the
right realtime card and software. Of course, the
best choice here is a Pinnacle Systems card and
software, as it will ensure the four most important
components for successful video creation - Relabilty,
Affordability, Creativity and Performance. In
terms of setting up a PC system, making sure you
have the right components, configured in the optimum
way will ensure you can spend your time being
a creative editor, rather than being one who spends
their time correcting time-wasting, niggling system
errors.
At a fundamental level making video and computers
talk to each other is a tricky business. Video
is interlaced while computer displays are noninterlaced.
Video operates in a mind bogglingly complicated
variation of YUV while computers use RGB, video
runs at different frequencies than most computer
clocks and displays.
VIDEO BANDWIDTH
AND STORAGE
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| Video editors working on a single
PC system may want to consider an external
firewire drive for backup. |
The uncompressed television signal broadcast
from your local TV stations and delivered to a
conventional TV is actually streaming data at
a rate of around 30MB per second, which translates
to 1.8GB per minute or a frightening 108GB per
hour. If you simply wanted to dissolve between
two of these uncompressed video streams, double
the numbers. Shocked? Well, if you move into the rarefied atmosphere
of a HDTV-quality signal, you start talking about
data rates of a staggering 6GB per second!
Of course, with these data rates and the
kind of storage needed to accommodate the huge
amount of information its not long before you
move from gigabytes to terabytes of space. Not
to mention the read/write rate needed by hard
drives used to store the video.
DV camcorders changed the whole desktop video
landscape when they arrived simply by compressing
video as it is recorded to tape. DV reduces the
original uncompressed video stream by a factor
of five (we say that video is compressed at a
rate of 5:1).
In real terms, this means that video transferred
to the PC from a camcorder has been reduced to
a rate of 6MB per second or 360MB per minute.
This is a much more manageable data rate for a
conventional hard drive to manage.
DV footage can be further compressed,
if necessary, using a good quality capture card
in the computer. A capture card like Pinnacle
Systems Pro-ONE or DV500 will not only allow
DV or analog video to be captured to the computers
hard drive, it can also compress incoming video
using either MPEG-2 (DVD quality) or MPEG-1 (VCD
quality) compression systems. All these elements
influence the decisions you make about the PC
system you need for the editing your DV footage.
Its very important to match you editing and output
expectations to the PC configuration, the capture
card and the software you use.
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