Video Equipment Reviews

Scan Lines

Hybrid Turnkey
Fast Electronics has announced a strategic partnership with Compaq Computers, resulting in a turnkey editing solution designed to meet the demands of today's advanced users. The system offers seamless integration of non-linear and linear editing, off- or on-line quality editing and scalable compression from 2:1 up to 100:1. Two different systems cover the needs of existing markets; all you add are the analog VCRs.

New Compression
The Huston Advanced Research Center (HARC) is using digital wavelet theory to bring high-quality video to PCs. The new HARC software uses wavelets to compress and encode the attributes of an image into a small amount of data. The result is a very smooth (38 frames per second) lifelike image. The software, called HARC-C, will compress an image to nearly 1/100 its original size without noticeable loss of clarity.

Product Menu

Megamotion 1.08 ($995)
Alpha Systems Lab
2361 McGraw Avenue
Irvine, CA 92714
(714) 622-0688

The newest release of Alpha Systems Lab's Megamotion now offers full-motion, full-screen video at better than VHS quality. The package includes new hardware-assisted software for transitions and special video effects. The board now supports three NTSC sizes including 320x240 pixels at 60 fields per second and 640x480 at 30 fields per second.

FlexCap Video Camera/capture ($795)
Videolabs
10925 Bren Road East
Minneapolis, MN 55343
(612) 988-0055

Here is a video camera/capture board combo designed specifically for the Windows environment. The camera mounts directly into the drive bay of any PC and includes digital capture functions, digital pan/tilt and software-controlled white balance and shutter. FlexCap will support a second camera head for multi- camera operations; each camera head supports two microphones.

Matrox Studio 3.0 ($13,490)
Matrox Electronic Systems Ltd.
1055 St. Regis Blvd.
Dorval, Quebec, Canada
(514) 685-2630

Release 3.0 of this professional editing system boosts its non-linear editing performance while adding interface capabilities for digital disk recorders and video servers. The new release also supports full A/B- roll nonlinear editing, separate graphics layers, hardware-accelerated transitions and four audio tracks in the nonlinear mode.

Movie Titler Lite ($99)
TV One Multimedia Solutions
1445 Jamike #8
Erlanger, KY 41018
(606) 282-7303

This Windows-based titler uses existing TrueType fonts, offering easy scaling and positioning of text. Movie Titler Lite offers numerous transitions, as well as standard vertical roll and horizontal crawl. All-in- one interface places preview, text editor and script windows on the same screen.

Screen Tests

Crystal Flying Fonts Pro 3.0 ($245)
CrystalGraphics
3110 Patrick Henry Drive
Santa Clara, CA 95054
(408) 496-6175

CrystalGraphics is best known for its TOPAS Professional 3D animation software. Flying Fonts takes the powerful TOPAS rendering engine and applies it to text. The result is high-quality, 3D animated text.

After an easy installation, Flying Fonts presents you with a large work area and a Tool palette. Here you choose to write text or build shapes from polygons--these are the basic building blocks for your pictures and animations. When done editing in text mode, letters and words become objects that you can no longer edit as text.

Once in object mode, you can use several different tools to modify the text. You can stretch the height, width and depth of each element in your workspace. You can bevel or rotate the text (on three axes); a material window allows you to texture-map metals, glass, marble or wood effects onto your objects.

You animate your objects by choosing Assign Motion from the Tool palette. There are sixteen different motion paths, and of which you can modify in both direction and sequence. You can select and save the motion, rotation axis, direction and path length of your animation.

This describes just the very basics of how you build a scene. At a more advanced level, you can combine multiple scenes into Scripts, create your own 3D objects, set lighting and modify colors or textures.

You render and save your work as an .AVI file. Three different rendering schemes are available, at several resolutions up to 640x480 pixels. Expect some downtime if you render your models at full resolution--this can be a lengthy process even with a fast Pentium computer.

Crystal Flying Fonts Pro 3.0 for Windows is a lot of fun to work with and makes truly eye-opening graphics and titles. The price is unbeatable as well. If you're looking for titling software, you'd do well to check this one out.

Ease of Learning: (4)
Ease of use: (4)
Documentation: (3)
Value: (4)

-Doug Polk