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In Software Downloads:
Adobe Premiere 6 (trial)
Paint Shop Pro 7 (trial)

Tips and Advice:
How to get started with computer video editing

Fire-wire Campaign:
Join our ongoing campaign

Edit-ready Sony Vaios
Sony is revamping its Vaio range of FireWire-equipped laptop PCs with the addition of four models that could be used for video editing. Two come with the lite version of Adobe’s Premiere 6 editing software, and all have Sony’s own MovieShaker video editor, DVgate video still/capture utilities, and PictureToy image manipulation program.
Each runs Windows XP Pro, has a MagicGate (MG) Memory Stick slot for MPEG-1 video storage and a magnesium alloy chassis, and centres on an Intel SpeedStep technology Pentium III Mobile chipset.
Premiere (and Adobe’s Photoshop Elements image editor) are supplied with the two top models – the 1.7GHz GRX316SP and 1.6GHz GRX316MP (prices still unknown), which take over from Sony’s GR series models. These machines are larger than previous models, accomodating 16in TFT screens with UXGA resolution of 1600 x 1200 pixels, and weighing in at 3.8kg. The GRX316SP has a 40GByte hard disk and 512MByte DDR-SDRAM; the MP has a 30GByte HDD and 256MByte RAM (upgradable to 512MByte). Each uses an ATI Mobility Radeon 7500 3D graphics chipset with 16MByte on-board DDR-SDRAM and has a CD-RW/DVD-ROM drive – though a DVD-RW burner is promised as an option in the near future.
Sony IT, 08705 424424; www.vaio.sony-europe.com/

ADSL broadband price cut should boost streaming video
Monthly ADSL broadband access costs for UK users are set to fall markedly, and the number of users rise dramatically, as a result of an unexpected cut by BT of its wholesale price to internet service providers (ISPs).
From April 1, ISPs will pay £17.33 (inc VAT) per customer per month for the recently introduced user self-install service, instead of the current £29.38. A number of ISPs have already announced new lower prices to the public that should make broadband much more attractive.
BT is cutting its own price from £40 per month to £30 for existing domestic users and new. New users are offered two schemes. One is self-install, where customers have to buy from BT an Alcatel USB modem (and two splitters/filters that allow ADSL and phone connections to be used
at the same time) and pay a £65 line-activation charge, though this fee is being waived until May 31. The other, where an engineer runs a cable near to the PC and fits a wall-socket with a built-in splitter/filter, includes a modem loaned free but has a £250 fee for line activation and installation.
The keenest monthly charge we’ve seen so far for self-install
is £23.44 (inc VAT), for Pipex’s Xtreme Solo service. This was introduced only at the beginning of February at £30 a month – at the time undercutting BT’s own Openworld ‘engineer assisted’ installation service by £10 a month – and was claimed to already be bringing in over 300 new users a day.

Western Digital 8MB-cache 120GB EIDE HDD
Video editors looking to get fast performance from EIDE hard disks – especially for use with dual-stream editing cards – may be attracted to the performance claims for Western Digital’s Special Edition 120GByte Ultra ATA/100 Caviar drive.
The company says that the 7,200rpm drive’s use of an 8MByte cache – four times larger than normal on EIDE models, and more typical of expensive SCSI drives – provides a higher percentage of cache hits and significantly faster data access than with 2MByte versions. The larger buffer is said to reduce the the number of physical accesses to the disk, allowing data to stream from the disk uninterrupted.
The best street price we could find for the drive was £244 (inc VAT) from www.komplett.co.uk – that’s around £22 more than komplett charges for the version with a 2MByte cache. Watch out for a review in a coming issue.
Western Digital, 01372 360 387; http://www.wdc.com

Video Forum 2002
This year’s Video Forum must have been the most successful to date. Wembley’s Hall 1 was crowded throughout most of the three days (February 5-7) and the show organiser reckons there was over 6500 visitors, a lot of whom also took the chance to check out Sounds Expo 2002 – a new audio show running alongside in Hall 2.
Free seminars on DVD authoring, video streaming and post-production – including Computer Video’s own - were all massively over-subscribed despite the fact that the number of seminars had increased hugely.
Big-name editing hardware firms were out in force and all had packed stands. Few, apart from Avid, were debuting new products. Nonetheless, all acknowledged the importance of compatibility with Windows XP and Mac OS X - some even offering related software upgrades.

For more news, see the April 2002 issue of Computer Video.

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Reviewed in April's issue:
Ulead DVD Workshop
Partitioning Reviews

In April's news:
Edit ready Sony Vaios
ADSL price cut
Western Digital
Video Forum 2002