Desktop Video: Digital Nonlinear Editing (page 3)

Music Video Heaven

The FAST DP/R card functions like two digital VCRs running at the same time. The hardware feeds two streams of video to the Video Machine card via a special high-capacity connector called the FAST Video Bus. The result: real-time transition effects, like those in the ImMIX VideoCube and Avid Media Composer, at prices one-third of those purely digital systems. No need to wait for effects to render--the Fast Video Machine has the dedicated processing to perform even the flashiest transitions in on the fly.

Since one of the DP/R's recorders can record while the other one plays, you can do effects with the Video Machine between one DP/R source and one tape source, and record the effects to hard disk.

The DP/R has eight tracks of synchronized DAT-quality digital audio. You can lay down a "bed" of music and cut the video to the beat. This makes the Fast VM-DP/R perfect for low-budget music videos.

The DP/R can even do rotoscoping and animation recording. You can compress a sequence of computer animation files (like the output from Autodesk 3D-Studio or Animator Pro) and play them back in real time through the VM- DP/R, which eliminates the need for a costly single-frame animation recorder.

Other Options

Matrox now offers a nonlinear option for their Studio editor. At the moment, it is a separate but very powerful nonlinear editor like the Avid Media Suite Pro, which just happens to be in the same box with the Studio. It doesn't allow you to mix analog and digital video as you can with the FAST. You use the nonlinear Studio "offline" to create an edit decision list (cuts only, at present). You then open up the linear Studio, add your effects, and do your "online" edit.

NewTek also offers a nonlinear option for the Toaster called Flyer. It makes the Toaster a nonlinear editing system. In linear mode, you can't edit with the Toaster without adding a separate controller card (like the RGB Amilink), audio mixing, and separate time base correctors. Now the Toaster Flyer has digital audio and video, with what they describe as "D2-quality" images produced by a proprietary new hardware-hardware codec called VTASC (Video Toaster Adaptive Statistical Compression).

Toaster Flyer's nonlinear editing interface will be instantly familiar to Toaster fans. A "crouton" (NewTek's name for the buttons that initiate effect transitions in the Toaster) represents each video clip. You simply arrange your clip croutons in the desired sequence order, and interleave transition croutons where you want them. Some call this a "storyboard" rather than a "timeline." Clips in the sequence are in time order, but all clips appear the same length on the screen in Flyer. A true timeline interface like the Video Machine shows each clip (usually with picture icons) with a length that is proportional to the duration of the clip.

PLAY, the new company formed by executives from Digital Creations, Progressive Image Technology, and NewTek, is likely to offer a nonlinear editor in early 1995 at the NAB show.

If you're already thinking about a nonlinear system that costs several thousand dollars, you should also look at the low-end of the nonlinear product line from Avid Technology. Avid pioneered nonlinear. They won an Emmy for it, and their name is almost synonymous with nonlinear in Hollywood and broadcast production circles.

Their $10,000 Media Suite Pro is a set of cards that you add to a suitably equipped Macintosh computer (typically $12,000 with monitor, memory, hard disks, etc.) Data Translation's Media 100 is also Macintosh-based. It costs a few thousand dollars more than Media Suite Pro, but its picture quality has dazzled industry observers.

Digital Video Distribution

Familiarizing yourself with digitized video today could reap many benefits in the future. And those benefits stretch beyond the knowledge of how to use the tools. Digital video compression provides more ways for you to distribute your work. At present, it looks like these new avenues will take the form of CD-ROMs and the "information superhighway," a future fiber-optic extension of the Internet. To squeeze your movie onto a CD, you'll need one of the new video interframe compression schemes. Indeo and MPEG are good candidates. A third is Supermac Cinepak. Cinepak is a "software-software" codec, one that compresses and decompresses without special hardware. It comes free with most nonlinear editing software and runs on your PC or Mac, but at present it runs very slowly. Compressing a two-hour movie takes a whole month of twenty- four hour operation on a fast desktop computer.

Once you've got your epic compressed, you might even dream about Internet distribution. Videomaker magazine is launching a World-Wide Web server on the Internet that may become a distribution medium for videos.

As the net gets bigger and faster, it's starting to do voice-grade radio broadcasting. It seems that video is the next step.

But let's be realistic. To achieve digital video distribution that will let you download quality videos on request, we'll probably have to rip up thousands of miles of old copper wire and lay in a million-lane fiber-optic hyperhighway for the twenty-first century.

Until that happens (as it surely will someday), we'll have to content ourselves with the incredible changes digital video compression is bringing to desktop video production.

Coming next month...We'll conclude this series of articles with a survey of computer-generated video, in which your DTV computer becomes a source of original video material.