Pinnacle DC30 Plus
Type: Analogue; Hardware: MPEG2.
Price: $1455.
Distributors:
Lako Vision.
Ph: 03 9852 7444; Fax: 03 9852 7400
www.lakovision.com.au
Multimedia Technology.
Ph: 03 9419 6600; Fax:03 9417 5799
www.mmt.com.au
The DC30 Plus is a large PCI MJPEG analogue capture card. The card is liberally sprinkled with video processing chips from Zoran, Miro and Micronas, and natively supports audio capture and playback with an Analogue Device chipset. The card provides internal connectors for composite video in and out as well as audio in and out. The five external connectors include input and output for both composite and S-video with RCA and 4-pin DIN connectors respectively. The fifth connector is an 8-pin DIN socket for the audio, but before you start worrying about sourcing such a weird audio cable, rest assured the entire rear panel of the card connects to a breakout box that conveniently sits on your desktop and provides RCA connectors for composite and audio and the standard S-video sockets.
Given the exemplary documentation that is supplied with all the Pinnacle products installation is not a nail-biting chore. The User's guide very clearly describes the installation process of both the hardware and software and includes clear diagrams where necessary. As with other Pinnacle products that supply Adobe Premiere and Photoshop LE as part of your kit, it is best to install Premiere first so you can direct the card's plug-ins to the correct location. Utilities are provided to test your system to ensure your new card is correctly installed and supported, you can even perform a speed test on your hard drives to make sure they are up to scratch.
In addition to Premiere, the card also includes TitleDeko to liven up the titling capabilities of Premiere, and Pixelan SpiceRack which provides 300 classy images to add spice to Premiere's gradient wipe. There is a separate User's Guide provided for TitleDeko that should get you up to speed quickly and of course Premiere is supplied with a large novel-sized tome.
We utilised the DC30's basic tools to capture and export our video and they proved easy to use and well behaved, the whole process ran without a hitch.
The quality of the DC30's video capture was certainly the best of all the analogue-only cards and was not all that inferior to the DV cards. The colours were stronger and less washed out than the competition, particularly the -all-in-one" cards. While image definition was good it naturally could not compete with the DV cards in this respect. Compression artefacts on our test file were few and far between but in certain circumstances (for example, around the curved body moulding of a car), there was some -staircasing" along the edges.
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