Desktop Video News & Review

Scan Lines

Minolta Snaps Officials at Play, Inc. have agreed to allow Minolta's Consumer Products Group to distribute their Snappy video frame grabber. Minolta now has exclusive distribution rights for Snappy in America, Mexico and South America. Snappy is a small, pocket-sized unit that you place in the parallel port of your PC or laptop; it will grab video frames at resolutions up to 1500x1125 pixels.

Fast Cartoons Autodesk has announced that it will sell its popular Animator Pro 1.3 software with all Fast Multimedia's Movie Line series hardware. This bundling will take place throughout the United States and in select markets in Europe. Other Autodesk products will be bundled with the Fast Movie Line in the near future. Animator Pro is one of the world's leading 2D animation software programs.

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S/Link 2.0 ($249)
The Synclavier Company
Lebanon, NH 03766
(603) 448-8887

What's been lacking for audio and multimedia professionals is a way to translate among incompatible digital audio formats. Now, the Synclavier Company offers S/Link 2.0 for the Macintosh. S/Link 2.0 overcomes problems like transferring files with incompatible formats or different sampling rates and resolutions.

DMX-4B Audio Switcher ($650)
Electric Works Corporation
Fort Worth, TX 76136
(817) 625-9761

Here's a PC-based audio switcher that accepts four unbalanced stereo signals and blends them into one balanced stereo output. The board offers stereo switching, mixing and fading control. Also included is a summed mono balanced output, as well as a provision for external level controls for each audio source. A bus jack will interconnect multiple DMX-4s on the same motherboard.

PC Video Edit ($60)
Sima Products Corporation
Niles, IL 60714
(708) 966-0300

Sima Products has offered low-cost consumer video enhancement products for some time. Now Sima enters the world of computer editing with the PC Video Ed/it. The unit uses the hard-wired source/infrared record scheme, with support for Control-L (Sony) or Control-M (Panasonic) source units. Pushing a button makes a finished recording of up to 99 scenes you log through the software.

Plum ($4995)
Interactive Images
Colorado Springs, CO 80920
(719) 598-3894

Plum is a low-cost professional nonlinear video editing system for PCs that boasts broadcast-quality video sampling at 720x480 pixels. Plum makes use of PCI-bus architecture, offering data transfer at up to 132MB a second. Configuration is of the Plug-and-Play type. Your computer will need a 90 MHz Pentium PC with 24MB RAM (minimum), PCI bus and AV disk drive (4.2 gigabyte minimum recommended). Included is a fast SCSI-2 card and Adobe Premiere 4.0. A Mac version is on the way.