Video's Middle Ground
Video editing on the PC has occupied two very distinct niches: entry-level for hobbyists who want to make frequently tedious home movies more watchable and high-end for professional production companies and videographers. Missing was a middle ground: robust but affordable real-time systems for businesses that need in-house video capabilities for training, marketing, and other purposes. That is, until recently.
"Take virtually any combination of the products discussed here and throw in a hot computer and you'll have video production capabilities superior to systems costing AU$100,000 or so only a few years ago," says PC Magazine contributing editor Jan Ozer. Ozer has been covering digital video since its inception (circa 1993), and has authored two books on the subject. So we asked him to build a DV station suitable for business. The core components he chose are the video-capture card, the DV camera, and a PC's hard drive.
Fortunately for businesses, PC hardware caught up to the demands of DV editing a couple years back. Our Pentium III/866 test-bed, with 128MB of RAM and a 7200RPM hard drive, was certainly up to the task. But this is one area where more speed--say, 256MB of RAM married to a 1.2GHz or faster processor--would certainly be put to use. A few seconds saved previewing here, a few minutes rendering there, and soon you're talking thousands of dollars saved in production time.
The capture cards we tested come bundled with DV-editing software (namely Adobe Premiere), which makes the AU$1,900 to $3,000 price tag easier to swallow. We picked two midrange video cameras (from DV powerhouses Canon and Sony) that deliver excellent video quality, and we also tested four hard drives that deliver the capacity and speed you'll need to render video on the fly.
Contents
FIRST PURCHASE: DV Camera | |
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SECOND PURCHASE: The Capture Card | |
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THIRD PURCHASE: Photo Printer | |
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