Benchmarks (page 5)

Spark Direct DV Editing System
($995 with Adobe Premiere 4.2; $699 without)
Digital Processing Systems
11 Spiral Drive, Suite 10
Florence, KY 41042
(606) 371-5533
http://www.dps.com

In all this discussion of DV camcorders, tapes and VCRs, we often forget that one of the defining elements of the technology--the IEEE 1394 FireWire--is not a video-specific technology; it's a high-speed serial bus, a fast and convenient way to transfer data from point A to point B.

That's why DPS, maker of digital video products for prosumer and professional markets, decided to contact Adaptec, a company that specializes in computer interfaces, when it was time to consider solutions for desktop nonlinear editing of DV footage. The product the two companies came up with is the Spark, a combination of Adaptec's AHA-8940 PCI bus IEEE-1394 host adapter and DPS's Spark Recorder software. Their goal: to ship a product that delivers on DV's promise to provide an easy interface between digital videotape and a standard nonlinear-editing platform. Though initially shipped in the Windows NT version, later versions promise to include Windows 95 and Macintosh users as well.

The Adaptec AHA-8940 PCI card has two female FireWire connectors for hooking up your DV camcorder or VCR to the board, as well as a single internal FireWire connector for connecting other FireWire-based devices. If you try to connect your camcorder's FireWire cable to the card, however, you'll be in for a surprise: the FireWire jacks on the Adaptec board were made to receive a different type of connector than those found on the typical cable supplied by DV camcorder manufacturers. This means that only the cable that came with the Spark card, and not the one that you may have bought from the camcorder manufacturer, will allow you to cable your DV camcorder or VCR to the Spark.

Installation of the Adaptec card was very simple and straightforward; within five minutes of opening the box, we were ready to start moving video off the DV tape and onto the hard drive. This shows how wise the folks at DPS were to pick Adaptec as their partner in producing the Spark; the company's long experience in the field of computer hardware becomes apparent when you find that it's possible to just install the board and forget about it. There were a few driver-related problems in early versions of the Spark, however; owners of the Matrox Millenium graphics accelerator, for example, had problems playing back their video creations, as did those who tried using the Spark with a Pentium motherboard that utilized the 440FX chipset and a Pentium Pro processor. DPS assures us that they will fix these problems for later release of the drivers; by the time this article goes into print, it may have been fixed already. Even so, a large number of early-adopters who were anxious to try the Spark as soon as it shipped were disappointed to discover that they had to wait a few weeks before their new FireWire card would operate properly. This practice is all too common in the fast-paced world of computer hardware. The manufacturers, in their race to bring a product to market ahead of their competitors, release a buggy, sub-standard version of the hardware drivers to the public, long before all of the research and development is completed, with the intention of releasing the fully functional versions of the driver software later.

Aside from the bundled Adobe 4.2 nonlinear editing package, the Spark software consists of a single item: the Spark Recorder, a simple, straightforward application for transferring clips from the DV camcorder or VCR to the hard drive. The interface is familiar, consisting of a frame counter display, a scroll bar (for "scrubbing" back and forth through a clip), a video monitor output button and a set of standard transport controls for playing back your video clips once they're on the hard drive. The earlier versions of the Spark Recorder--including our test model--would not control the source deck with these transport controls, but future versions of the software promise to provide this capability.

Editing with the Spark requires moving back and forth between Premiere and the Spark Recorder. First, you transfer your clips to the hard drive; then you edit within Adobe Premiere; and finally, you output the finished production to tape, again with the Spark Recorder. While operating the Spark Recorder, you can view transferred clips or finished productions from the hard drive on a television monitor if you leave the FireWire cabled up to the camcorder or VCR. The reason: Spark has no hardware DV codec; it must use the hardware codec inside the camcorder or VCR to display images on the monitor (through the DV camcorder or VCR's analog video connection).

Working with DV clips from within Premiere is a little trickier; you can't preview your edits on an NTSC monitor from within Premiere, only on the computer screen. This means that the speed of your computer's CPU and graphics accelerator will directly affect the quality of your previews. On our 133MHz test computer, equipped with the Diamond 3D Stealth 2000 graphics card, full-motion playback was limited to a tiny 180x120 window. Another processor-related issue was the time it took to render a short one-minute project with five simple transitions--which came out to about 18 minutes on our test-bay computer. Again, the reason for the relatively long wait is the lack of the hardware DV codec on the Adaptec board.

In short, the Spark will be a good low-budget option for DV editing, once DPS irons out a few bugs in the software. It doesn't offer anything but IEEE-1394 input and output, and it won't help you with the task of incorporating your existing analog footage into your DV productions. But it will allow you to edit your DV footage on the hard drive and transfer it, loss-free, back onto the DV tape. For some--especially those who can't afford to put down $4000 for a FireWire input device--this will be enough to produce high-quality videos on their computers with a minimum of fuss.

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