Pinnacle DV 500
Type: Digital Video and Analogue MPEG2.
Price: $2,404.
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
If size matters, then the DV500 wins hands down. It's about the length of the -all-in-one" cards, the largest of the products tested, but also includes a -piggy-back" daughterboard. The daughterboard appears to provide at least some of the DV functionality as it includes TI's 1394 controller chip. Video capture and compression are provided by Philips, Intel and C-Cube chips while the native audio tasks are offloaded to a Crystal CS4231A chip.
The DV500 does not lack I/O ports with one internal and two external IEEE1394 (Firewire) ports for direct connection to a DV camera equipped with an IEEE1394 port. This simple and fast connection allows the download of video and audio in digital format from the camcorder. Also present on the back of the card is a D-Sub connector for the expansion box that includes input and output ports for S-video, composite video and analogue audioâ€"the latter two are the standard RCA-style connectors.
Installing the plug and play PCI card was a breeze. Although, if you are a tad cavalier in your attitude to reading installation manuals, you may miss the suggestion that the supplied Adobe Premiere software must be installed before the DV500 and driver software is installed. We tried to be a bit perverse and installed in the wrong order to see what would happen, but as long as you have the same installation directory for Premier specified during both the Adobe installation and driver installation, we found it still all worked fine. The software bundled with the card is extensive and of a high quality including full versions of Adobe Premiere 5.1, Adobe Photoshop 5 LE, Sonic Foundry Acid Music, Minerva Impression 2 (video authoring), TitleDeko and Hollywood FX Copper version 4. We found Acid Music quite useful, enabling us to compose our own music to dub onto our final video product, TitleDeko proved useful creating our end credits, Hollywood FX and SpiceRack are Premiere plug-ins that supply an extra swag of digital effects.
The basic DV500 tools provide a simple interface to configure, capture and output your video masterpiece. DV Device Control is a small VCR-style interface that controls your DV camcorder with the click of a mouse, it is a simple task to search for your clip and then click the single record button and the camcorder starts playback and the video begins saving to disk. What could be simpler? The User's Guide outlines the general functionality of the hardware; DV500 video tools and has chapters covering the operation of the tools, TitleDeko and SpiceRack. The guide is clearly written with plenty of accurate diagrams and a detailed index and glossary at the back. Minerva Impression and Hollywood FX are supplied with their own small manuals and both manuals are quite detailed. The 393-page Premiere User's Guide is the most impressive tome and includes a very helpful tutorial section as well as detailed descriptions of the software's functionality.
It comes as no surprise, given the pricing of the unit, that the capture and output quality of the DV500 in DV mode is excellent, with vivid colour and great definition. We also tried a very quick grab using the analogue inputs of the card. The quality, while definitely not up to the DV capture, was very good, certainly on par with the other analogue Pinnacle products and visibly superior to the -all-in-one" cards.
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