Desktop Video: Digital Nonlinear Editing (page 2)
Rendering Your Effects
Digital effects programs work much better on the Mac platform than on the PC. Programs like CoSA After Effects (compositing), VideoFusion (morphing), and Infini-D (3-D animation) have really helped make the Mac the DTV platform of choice for short, punchy MTV-type videos.
But be warned: these programs take some time to "render" (or crunch the numbers on) all those snazzy effects. Prepare to let your machine work overnight and come in the next morning to see your finished video.
Despite this slowness, the quality of the video they produce is "ready for prime time." One husband-and-wife production team sold five twenty-second spots produced on a Macintosh Quadra to ESPN for $100,000. That's $1000 per second of finished video! They used a Radius VideoVision Studio card and Adobe Premiere editing software that cost about what they received for just one of their five ESPN-2 spots. What a payback!
Even for short works like this, you'll have to purchase a large hard disk for your video files. I recommend fast AV- ready removable hard drives like the Micropolis Microdisk AV LT. AV-ready hard drives drop information during capture or skip frames on playback, as ordinary computer-data hard disks often do.
A Hundred to Choose From
Okay, we're ready to move forward from our strategy of editing clips digitized on a friend's capture card. The next step? Nonlinear editing.
Nearly 100 nonlinear products appeared at this year's NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) show. Even the citadels of tape, Sony and Panasonic, have announced nonlinear systems (Destiny and PostBox). We clearly can't afford to discuss them all in a brief article, so we'll mention a few that you should know about.
Touchvision's D/Vision Pro ($3950) has served as an "offline" editing system for many major motion pictures and television shows. ("Offline" means making editing decisions on a copy of the master, or a lower resolution version requiring less storage space.)
The software is DOS-based, and the hardware-hardware codec uses a compression scheme called DVI (Digital Video Interactive), developed years ago by RCA and Intel. Touchvision will probably move their editing software to a Motion-JPEG capture and compression card soon.
Hybrid Editing Systems
The major players in computer-based linear editors and switcher/SEGs are all planning nonlinear options soon. (See last month's column for details on computer-based switcher/SEGs like the Fast Video Machine, and Matrox Studio.) Machines like these that offer both options are called hybrid systems.
A hybrid system uses your tape-based footage for the final edit, so the edit master is free of digital artifacts. Hybrid systems are faster than both linear systems, with their searching and cueing time, and nonlinear systems, with their lengthy rendering time for effects.
The best hybrid system is, without a doubt, the Digital Player/Recorder nonlinear option for the FAST Video Machine ($4000, Lite $2500). The speedy tape-based editing on the Fast Video Machine is even faster with the DP/R ($6000). This single card puts two digital disk-based VCRs in the same box with the tape-based editor and SEG, mixing linear and nonlinear editing for about $10,000.
