Inside
the magazine
Self-help message board
Article reprints
How to contact us
Web links directory
Software downloads
Tips and advice
Fire-wire campaign
Subscribe today
Help Me, I'm new!
Fair pricing petition
Home
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
|
COMPUTER VIDEO
NEWS - JUNE 2003
Canopus cuts
loose
Launch
of own video editing program prepares Canopus for the days of software-only
editing
Canopus is set to
launch in May its own full-featured Windows video editing program, having
to date largely relied on programs made by Adobe, Sonic Foundry and
Ulead to run on its editing cards. Edius will have an SRP of £469
(inc VAT), but be available until the end of August at an introductory
price of £233.
The move won't just save Canopus money on buying in Adobe Premiere or
other programs. Far more importantly, it's a major step in preparing
for the day when the ever increasing speed of processors and graphics
cards does away with the need - at semi-pro and home-user level - for
sophisticated editing hardware such as the company's DVStorm card.
Edius initially works only with Canopus's DVRex RT and DVStorm editing
cards, where it offers real-time external previewing, but will, according
to the company's European arm, be offered in future in an OHCI version
that will run on standard FireWire hardware. This will be a relatively
easy transition, seemingly. The program is already hardware independent
and fully scalable to take advantage of increasing processor speeds
and features such as multi-processors and sophisticated CPU instructions
(Hyper-Threading, MMX, SSE and SSE2 and 3DNow!). In addition, it's said
to use full YUV colour space processing and work with the processors
on some graphics cards to speed up effects rendering.
The program's floating window design is fully customisable and best
suited for work across two monitors. It includes a timeline, bin and
effect selector window; dual or single preview monitors; novel timecode
and audio level overlay displays; drop-down buttons; and a real-time
waveform and vectorscope window for monitoring video levels while capturing
and previewing. DV device control with batch capture is built in, along
with analogue deck control via the RS-422 connector on the DVRex RT
Pro card.
There is an unlimited number of tracks for video, audio, graphics and
titles, plus audio waveform display; voiceover recording to timeline;
and unlimited undo/redo. The timeline provides an array of editing techniques
- three-point, four-point and ripple, slip and slide editing, as well
as audio/video split editing.
Nice touches include ShuttleScrub jog/shuttle control by rotating the
mouse over the preview window, and similar fast edit options where flicking
the mouse on the preview window left or right sets a clip's start-point
and end-point, and flicking it down sends the clip to the timeline.
There are 27 customisable real-time video filters, including white/black
balance, colour balance, chroma-keying, luma-keying and 2D/3D picture-in-picture
effects. Also in the bundle is a version of Canopus's special effects
and transition software, Xplode, giving over 40 groups of customisable,
real-time 2D/3D transitions.
Inscriber TitleExpress RT is included, too, with 170-plus customisable
title templates. This offers numerous real-time title-motion effects
- such as blur, dissolve, slide, wipe and laser - and these, it's said,
can be applied to unlimited title and graphics layers.
Also in-pack is a lite version of Canopus's media re-purposing program,
ProCoder, that's said to have export options for MPEG-1/2, Windows Media,
RealVideo, QuickTime and Canopus's own DV AVI format. What the program
doesn't have, though, is any direct DVD authoring features - though
these may arrive in a MkII or later versions of Edius.
Minimum system requirements are Windows 2000/XP, a dedicated video hard
disk (10MByte/sec sustained transfer rate), a 1GHz Pentium III or Athlon
processor and 256MByte RAM (2GHz/512MByte recommended).
Canopus UK, 020
7793 1188; www.canopus-uk.com
Canopus educational prices
Canopus has announced
new educational pricing for its latest hardware and software. Educational
institutions in the UK and Ireland can get 25 per cent off the maker's
retail price for hardware, and up to 50 per cent off software - including
the new Edius professional video editing program (though not off the
introductory price of £233, inc VAT).
The savings, which are also open to students with valid student ID cards,
apply only to Canopus's own hardware/software - not to third party products
sold by the company, or bundled with hardware.
Summer DVD entry for Adobe
Adobe Encore DVD
packs in pro features missing from early-bird competitors
Adobe is entering
the DVD authoring market in summer with Encore DVD, a Win XP program
priced at around £530 and looking to have more professional features
than any current sub-£1,000 Windows DVD-creation offering.
The program provides support for the Macrovision and CSS copy-protection
systems; output to DLT tape masters in DPP format for mass duplication
(with support for dual-layer 8.54GByte discs and regional coding); creation
of eight audio streams and 32 subtitle streams; and type-in text for
subtitles. In addition, it's able to add to DVD content that's readable
only on PC DVD-ROM drives.
Integration with other Adobe programs is central to the workflow. Layered
Photoshop images are at the heart of menu design. Encore does have menu
templates and design tools but, for more elaborate work, pages and other
graphics can be automatically opened within Photoshop using Encore's
Edit Original option. Changes will be reflected over in Encore - without
the PSD file having to be flattened for use, and remaining fully editable.
Markers can be imported from Premiere's timeline and converted to DVD
chapter points. Encore's own editing tools allow files to be topped
and tailed, but Premiere can be made to open source files if further
editing is required - and the Encore project updated automatically with
the changes. A similar Open Original option is also available for After
Effects and Illustrator source files.
All four sister programs are bundled into Adobe's Digital Video Collection
and there's talk that Encore will be added, too, without a major increase
in the bundle's £1,200 price. This is despite the fact that Premiere
and After Effects are likely to receive major overhauls around the time
that Encore is launched, giving their integration a further boost.
At its core, though, Encore has technology licensed from Sonic Solutions
- one of the companies to have made hay with DVD in Adobe's absence.
Encore shares quite a few of the features of Sonic's upmarket timeline-based
program, DVD Producer. But, unlike the Sonic product, Encore won't initially
support dedicated hardware that boosts rendering speed, and will only
encode to Dolby AC-3 in stereo, not in 5.1 surround-sound - though it
can burn 5.1 content created in other applications.
What's not clear is whether Encore will be able to create and burn VCD
and SVD projects or allow projects to be re-edited after the final files
have been created - a feature found in Sonic's DVD Producer and in some
versions of MyDVD. What's definitely not included, though, is support
for multiple camera angles.
Even so, there's still plenty more on the features list. Sophisticated
menu-design tools will be accompanied, it's promised, by a wide selection
of high-quality, ready-made, but customisable, templates to make users'
lives easier. Not surprisingly, Encore can create animated menus and
backgrounds and write to the big five DVD recordable formats, including
DVD-RAM. An MPEG encoder is built-in and comes with ready-to-use presets,
as well as options to adjust settings and save them for later use. The
encoder works with existing MPEG-2 footage, and can also use as its
source AVI, Windows Media 9 and MPEG-1 files.
System requirements are said to be Win XP (Pro or Home); a P4 processor
(no mention is made of AMD); 256MByte RAM; and 2GByte disk space for
the installation. Only four burners are officially supported - the HP
200i; Panasonic SW-9571; Pioneer DVR-A05; and Sony DRU-500A - but others
will be added as testing goes on.
The package will include a training DVD produced by Total Training holding
around an hour's content.
Adobe, 020 8606
4001; www.adobe.co.uk
Scratch-resistant writable DVD
TDK claims that
its ScratchProof DVD-R/-RW blanks are up to 100 times more scratch-resistant
than other blank discs.
The company says that the discs use a hard-coat material applied with
special spin-coating technology to resist scratches, fingerprints and
dust - the main causes of read/write errors, and something that users
frequently complain about. Discs will go out for around £4 for
DVD-R and £7 for DVD-RW. ScratchProof DVD+R/+RW discs are promised
shortly.
TDK, 01737 771 212;
www.tdk-europe.com
Pinnacle outside the box
Pinnacle's expanded
range of external editing solutions now includes low-cost analogue DV
converter
Pinnacle is expanding
its range of external editing solutions for Windows with the introduction
of two sub-£200 FireWire and USB 2.0 packages that are bundled
with V8.6 of the company's Studio editing and DVD-creation program -
claimed to be far more stable than the current 8.5 version.
One, the MovieBox DV, goes out at £199 and thus looks to be the
cheapest DV<>analogue converter box on the market (if you take
off the price of the included £50 software). The other, MovieBox
USB, costs £149 and works with USB 1.1 or 2.0.
Both can capture from composite and S-video sources and output to them
as well. In addition, the DV version, which requires a standard OHCI
FireWire port to be fitted to the PC, can also capture and output using
FireWire.
Power supplies and cables to connect to a PC are included - a USB 2.0
cable in one case, and two FireWire cables in the other, one four-pin-to-six-pin
the other six-pin-to-six-pin. Minimum system requirements are said to
be a 500MHz Pentium or AMD processor, Win 98SE, 128MByte RAM and DirectX
8. Recommended specs are a 1GHz CPU, Win XP and 256MByte RAM. The installation
takes up 300MByte of disk space before recording any video - which comes
in at the rate of 45MByte/minute on the USB model and 216MByte/minute
on the DV version.
Pinnacle, 01895
424228; www.pinnaclesys.co.uk
DVRaptor RT 2 goes real-time
Canopus adds real-time
Premiere 6.5 capabilities and disc authoring with MkII DVRaptor RT
Canopus's mid-market
Windows editing card DVRaptor RT is being replaced by a version said
to offer some of the real-time capabilities of its more expensive stablemate,
DVStorm, for the keen price of £387 (inc VAT).
Multiple moving titles and graphics layers using up to three streams
of video are reckoned to be possible using Premiere V6.5 (not included
but an affordable £150 upgrade option), as well as over 30 simultaneous
RT title and graphic layers, and real-time DV/analogue output.
DVRaptor RT2 offers DVD creation, too, thanks to the inclusion of a
lite version of Ulead's DVD Workshop. MPEG rendering, though, won't
be ultra fast, because Raptor uses Canopus's SoftMPG MPEG-1/2 encoder,
rather than having a hardware encoder on-board as with DVStorm. The
company's basic video editing program EzEdit is provided, too, along
with its DV capture tool - offering single-pass scan and capture for
up to three video streams at once (if an extra FireWire card - and fast
hard disks - are fitted).
Rendering is said to be fully scalable - a faster processor boosts editing
performance and RT capabilities. The card has 24 real-time video filter
plug-ins - including colour correction, mosaic, emboss, picture-in-picture,
chromakey, lumakey and chrominance - and its internal video keying is
done in YUV, instead of the more usual RGB, for claimed better output
quality and keying results, and with slow-mo quality apparently on a
par with that of DVStorm.
For an extra £35, the card can come with RaptorRT Power Tools
- normal price £81. These RT effects offer six video filters and
eight 3D transitions, including customisable 3D picture-in-picture transitions,
as well as white/black balancing, mirror, Raster Scroll and Tunnel Vision.
Ports are the same as on the MkI - four-pin DV in/out and S-video, composite
video and L-R analogue audio outputs. Analogue input can be added by
opting for a £539 bundle that has Canopus's ADVC-50 one-way (analogue>digital)
converter as well as Power Tools. Also worth noting are the MkII's locked
audio support for better video/audio synchronisation with DVCAM format,
and the minimum spec - a 700MHz PIII processor, Win XP or 2K, and 256MByte
of RAM; though a faster processor and more RAM will be needed for RT
performance.
Canopus UK, 020
7793 1188; www.canopus-uk.com
Panasonic DVD camcorder
DVD-R/DVD-RAM one-chip
camcorder equipped with USB 1.1
Panasonic is to
release, in July, a DVD camcorder that takes 8cm DVD-RAM and DVD-R discs
housed in slim, round caddies.
The VDR-M30 (price still unknown, but expected to be well under £1,000)
offers three MPEG-2 recording modes. Recording times on a 2.8GByte DVD-RAM
disc are said to be between 18 and 60 minutes per side in Xtra mode
(10Mbit/sec maximum variable bit-rate); half-an-hour in Fine (6Mbit/sec
at constant bit-rate); and up to one hour in Standard (3Mbit/sec, CBR).
On a 1.4GByte single-sided DVD-R, times are up to 30min in Fine, and
up to an hour in Standard.
The M30 can record stills to DVD-RAM or SD memory card in three quality
modes at a relatively lowly resolution of 640x480 pixels. A RAM disc
will hold nearly 2000 JPEG stills, but the capacity of the supplied
SD card (probably an 8MByte unit) isn't yet known.
The USB 1.1-equipped camcorder has a 0.25in/800,000 pixel imager CCD,
and an F1.8/10x optical zoom lens with a focal length of 3.15-31.5mm
and taking 30.5mm filters. Digital zoom is 240x. A 2.5in (112K pixel)
colour LCD monitor is paired with a 0.44in (113K pixel) colour viewfinder,
and there's an accessory shoe for a microphone or light.
Also on the features list are manual focus, white balance and exposure,
and five program AE (auto exposure) settings. Ports include a four-pin
AV output for composite video and analogue L-R audio; S-video output;
and a stereo headphone socket.
The M30 weighs around 500g, and will come with an 8cm DVD-RAM disc,
an AC adapter, a shoulder strap, an AV cable (RCA, four-pin), an IR
remote controller, a lens cap and an as yet unannounced software bundle.
Panasonic, 08705
357357; www.panasonic.co.uk
Mightier than the mouse
Wacom pen-driven
electronic drawing pads and interactive displays
Wacom reckons that
its pen-driven graphic tablets (electronic drawing pads) are great add-ons
for Mac and Windows video editing systems, making detailed artwork easier
in the likes of Pinnacle Commotion and Adobe After Effects (and Photoshop,
of course), and also in straight editing programs such as Adobe Premiere.
Its Intuos2 tablets - priced between £165 and £705 - start
with an A6-size model with an active area of 127x106mm, and go up to
A3 size, with a 316x457mm working surface. In between are two A4s (240x304mm,
£430; and 304x316mm, £477), and a single A5 tablet (162x203mm,
£301). Each ships with a ball-free cordless mouse. The mouse supplied
with the A4 and A3 tablets is described as being 4D (rather than the
normal 2D) by virtue of having 360 degree control and zooming capabilities.
The tablets connect by USB or serial leads, and the cordless pens and
mice get their power from the tablet. A Grip pen and stand are included,
along with drivers for Windows (95 to XP), and Mac OS (8.5 through to
OS X, but still in beta for OS 10.2). The bundles are rounded off with
set-up software and Corel's Painter Classic program.
The company also offers hardware with a more intuitive way of working
than drawing on a tablet while looking up at a screen - but at a price.
Its Cintiq 15in and 18in flat-panel TFT touch-screen interactive displays
are £1,526 and £3,406. These monitors-cum-tablets connect
via VGA (Win) or DVI (Mac), with control signals communicated via USB
or serial port. They're mounted on tilting stands and the 18in model
also swivels L-R through 180 degrees.
The Cintiqs come with pens, but both ranges can instead be used with
an Airbrush pen (£100) and other pens designed for particular
tasks such as creating the softer feel of a paint brush (the Stroke
pen, £71); and writing as with a normal pen (the Ink Pen; £71).
Wacom; 0049 2151-36140;
www.wacom-europe.com/uk
Sony burn-all DVD laptops
Two portable PCs
with DVD-R/-RW/+R/+RW burners join Vaio edit-ready, FireWire-equipped
line-up
Sony's latest edit-ready
FireWire-equipped Vaio laptops - the PCG-GRV616S and the PCG-GRX616SP
- are fitted with writers able to burn to all four DVD formats, in much
the same way as Sony's DRU-500A 5.25in IDE burner. Suggested retail
prices, inc VAT, are £2,302 and £3,001.
The removable burners are said to write to all DVD disc formats at 1x;
CD-R at 16x; and CD-RW at 8x. Read speeds are 2x for DVD-R/-RW and DVD+RW
discs; 5x for DVD-ROM; and 24x for CD-ROM.
Included in the bundled software are Sony's own Click to DVD and Drag'n'Drop
CD+DVD 3.0 programs for basic DVD burning, and - for video editing -
a lite version of Adobe Premiere 6.0 plus Sony's entry-level MovieShaker.
Also in-pack are Sony's DVgate suite and its Smart Capture video/stills
grabber. Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0 is included for stills manipulation,
along with Sony's PictureGear Studio imaging tools. The bundle is rounded
off with QuickTime 5, SonicStage audio software, Norton Antivirus 2003,
InterVideo's WinDVD 4.0 player, RealOne Player 6.0, Adobe Acrobat 5.1
and Callserve.
The more expensive GRX616SP has Windows XP Pro, but runs on a slower,
2.4GHz, mobile P4 processor than the GRV616S, which has a 2.6GHz processor
and runs XP Home. However, it has a gigabyte of 266MHz DDR SDRAM - twice
as much as the cheaper laptop - yet uses a ATI Mobility Radeon 7500
graphics processor with 32MByte of DDR SDRAM - rather than the 616S's
64MByte Radeon 9000 - and provides a resolution of 1600x1200 on its
16.1in TFT monitor, rather than 1280x1024 on the S model.
Shared features take in a 60GByte hard drive and one Type III PC card
slot, two Type II slots, and a Memory Stick slot. There is a single
FireWire (i.Link) port, along with sockets for USB 1.1 (three), VGA,
mic, headphone, printer, modem, Ethernet and S-video TV output. Neither
model offers a floppy disk drive.
Each PC is 355mm wide and weighs around 3.8kg with battery and burner,
but the SP is slightly shorter and shallower - 40(h) x 292(d)mm, vs
43(h) x 295(d)mm.
Sony Electronics,
08705 424424; www.sony.co.uk
Ulead edit-on-DVD software
Latest Ulead video
editing and DVD authoring programs support on-disc editing
Ulead says that
three of its latest programs can be used with Panasonic's DVD Multidrive
(SW-9571-CYY) to read, edit and write video created in the Video Recording
(VR) format on DVD-RAM discs - and implies the same is true with DVD-RAM
on all VR-compatible camcorders and EIDE/FireWire/USB 2 burners.
That means that the software - budget DVD authoring program DVD MovieFactory
2 and Ulead's two video editors, VideoStudio 7 and MediaStudio Pro 7
- should be usable with products such as the Panasonic's VDR-M30 camcorder
(news, p10) and LF-D521 multi-burner, and probably with Hitachi's DZ-MV270
camcorder.
They should definitely work with two Hitachi DVD-RAM models due in summer,
the DZ-MV350 and DZ-MV380, which have Flash Memory card slots and USB
2.0 connectivity, are about half the size of the DZ-MV270, and expected
to sell for around £800. Whether they'll be usable with Sony's
DVD100 and DVD200 camcorders (news, April 2003, p8), isn't clear, because
these use DVD-RW for rewriting.
On the downside, VR-format DVD-RAM discs won't play in set-top DVD players
or DVD-ROM drives that don't support VR - the majority, currently -
and so will need to be converted to DVD-Video. That's in contrast with
discs in the competing DVD+RW Real Time Video Format (DVD+VR) being
pushed by the DVD+R/+RW camp, which are claimed not only to be editable
but also playable in a wide range of machines.
Ulead; 01327 844880;
www.ulead.co.uk
UPDATES
Pinnacle Edition
5 latest
More details about
Pinnacle's Edition 5 video editing software have come available since
we wrote our news story (May 03, p12). Drivers allowing the program
to operate the DV500 editing card will be issued, but these will not
allow real-time analogue output, which requires the AGP combi-card provided
with Edition Pro. At a monitor resolution of 1600x1200, the program
is claimed to allow a full PAL image to be previewed on the PC screen.
Upgrade prices for users of V4.0 and 4.5 are expected to be trivial
- and users are being promised good (though as yet unspecified) deals
if opting for the Pro version with combi-card - perhaps half price.
Similar deals are likely to be offered to owners of other Pinnacle hardware,
and the company is also promising keenly priced cross-grades to owners
of competing software. In a three-month-long promotion, Edition 5 (standard
version) will be given free to purchasers of a range of Sony DVCAM kit
- three camcorders (DSR-250P, DSR-PD150P, DSR-PDX10P) and the DSR-11
VTR.
Pinnacle, 01895
424228; www.pinnaclesys.com
Final WM9 update
The release version
of Microsoft's Windows Media 9 Series is available as a 9.7MByte download
for Windows XP and (13.3MByte for Win 98SE/ME/2000) at: www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/download/default.asp.
Features include support for faster streaming for broadband users; new
video and audio Codecs; the ability to play back content in full 5.1
surround sound; rapid searching of personal media libraries; and the
latest Smart Jukebox feature for easier management of digital media.
Microsoft, 0870
601 0100; www.microsoft.com
Read more news
in June 2003's Computer Video magazine.
|
Recent features...
View
the archive
Reviewed in June's
issue:
Sonic Foundry Vegas 4.0 +DVD
SurCode Dolby V-Plug
Ulead DVD Workshop AC-3
Final Cut Express
Magix Video Deluxe 2.0 Plus
In June's news:
Canopus cuts loose
Canopus educational prices
Summer DVD entry for Adobe
Scratch-resistant writable DVD
Pinnacle outside the box
DVRaptor RT 2 goes real-time
Panasonic DVD camcorder
Mightier than the mouse
Sony burn-all DVD laptops
Ulead edit-on-DVD software
Pinnacle Edition 5 latest
Final WM9 update
|