ATI All-In-Wonder 128 Pro
Type: Analogue, Hardware MPEG2.
Price: $549.
Distributors:
BBF Components & Peripherals
Ph: 1800 803 802; Fax: 1800 803 822
www.bbf.com.au
Servex
Ph: 02 8762 3500; Fax: 02 9764 3290
www.servex.com.au
Three of the products evaluated included an integrated 2D/3D graphics accelerator, or perhaps we should say they were graphics cards that included video capture and editing facilities. Quite acceptable 2D and 3D graphics acceleration is provided by an ATI Rage 128 Pro graphics processor coupled with 32MB of display memory, and a Rage Theatre chip is also responsible for ATI's -high-quality video output", to quote the vendor.
The AGP 4x card is small despite the large 125-channel TV tuner that gobbles quite a large chunk of the board space. A rather neat function of the tuner software provided is the ability to recognise -hot words" in the live program and notify the user.
The ATI is certainly not short on I/O; there are a pair of internal audio connectors, line-in, and line-out. The idea here is to plug your DVD directly into the card to provide high quality audio output at the ATI card, simplifying the connection of TVs and VCRs to your PC, some of the cards we have seen in the past require the sound to be sourced from the sound card instead. The line out then plugs into your sound card so the DVD is effectively -passed through" the ATI.
External connector space is pretty limited on the back plane of a card so ATI has -condensed" the functionality into a number of non-standard ports and supplied appropriate adaptor cables to sort out the signals. It's almost impossible to mix up the inputs and the outputs as the purple input cable has a small connection box at the end with S-video and RCA composite and audio inputs. This contrasts to the black output cable, which is just that, a cable that splits into an S-video plug, RCA composite plug and (unfortunately) a 3.5mm stereo audio plug. I say unfortunately because every VCR and camera I have seen has RCA audio inputs and so do most video dubbing cables. In general, the cables are short and terminate in female connectors and because most of us don't happen to have an S-video or composite video fly lead, these are also supplied in the package. There is an aerial input for the tuner and of course a D-sub connector for your VGA monitor.
Installing the ATI is relatively painless, after the card is detected by Windows 98, simply inserting the driver CD gets the ball rolling to the extent that all the capture utilities and the like are installed in one hit. Ulead VideoStudio 4 of course is a separate install but of VideoStudio's many shortcomings the very simple installation is not one of them.
While not earth-shattering in their scope the two ATI manuals, -Installation and Setup Users Guide" and -Multimedia Centre Users Guide" are certainly far superior to any of the other -all-in-one" cards we tested. The manuals are clearly laid out with good diagrams and easy-to-follow instructions and descriptions. Ulead's documentation on the other hand, is online and at each step of the way during production of your -movie", a small dialog box pops up to explain, in a very abbreviated way, how to proceed. Supplied software, of course, includes capture and output utilities including ATI's Multimedia Centre which functions as a CD player, digital VCR and DVD player for example.
Ulead VideoStudio 4 is a very simple video editing utility on par with the Avid Cinema supplied with the Matrox Marvel for example. A more complete description of the product can be found in the VideoStudio sidebar. It is worth mentioning, however, that we found the VideoStudio software to be very -flaky" on our test system, and even when we resorted to an Intel PIII 866MHz system with a CC820 motherboard and clean basic installation of Windows 98SE and the ATI drivers, VideoStudio still behaved badly.
Output quality of the ATI was quite good when compared with the other analogue capture cards, it was of course no match for the more expansive products from Pinnacle, but was on par with the Matrox and definitely superior to the ASUS. Colour was good for its ilk, pale naturally when compared to the vivid DV products, but then analogue transfer by its very nature both to and from the card is a -lossy" process. The image definition was quite good, again, a slight loss when compared to the original, but nothing too dramatic.
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