Swann Firewire VideoWorks Pro DV
Type: Digital Video.
Price: $299.
Distributor: Swann Communications.
Ph: 02 9421 2811; Fax: 02 9421 3688
www.swann.com.au
Swann's Firewire is a tiny PCI card featuring three external IEEE1394 ports. And, although the card we were supplied with was based on the Texas Instruments chipset, the new product will probably feature a Lucent chipset instead. It should be stressed that this is a digital video board only, and a very reasonably priced one at that; if you need analogue inputs look somewhere else.
The package comes complete with a two-metre IEEE1394 camcorder cable and, to our surprise, a set of stereo headphones complete with small headset mic. This is just the ticket for connecting to your soundcard to add voiceovers to your clip or viewing your results without disturbing the household.
Installing the card was very simple. No special video Firewire drivers are necessaryâ€"in contrast to the DV-200, for exampleâ€"the drivers are standard Windows 98 IEEE1394 drivers. There is a surprising amount of software provided with the Swann given its low price point. For newbie video directors, there is Ulead's VideoStudio DV 4.
Capturing a clip is pretty easy although we did experience some problems with compatibility and our Sony camera but, as previously mentioned, this appears to be a problem with Sony's -iLink" implementation of IEEE1394 because a Panasonic we used worked without a hitch. All this meant was that the program's capture and output functions could not directly control the camera. In fact, we had to resort to using the Panasonic to store our final movie but given the quality of the two cameras, this did not interfere in our output quality assessment. Output quality was very good with rich colours, certainly superior to the quality of the results for non-IEEE1394 based systems (although we did notice some slight artefacts when compared to the output from MainActor, for example).
For the more advanced, or if you aspire to more editing power than Video-Studio can provide, then give MainActor a try, also bundled with the Swann. MainActor is actually a suite of programs and we found that we only needed to use three of the modules, Capture, Sequencer, and Output. Those familiar with Premier's layout and logic should find MainActor Sequencer relatively easy to come to grips with. Obviously there are some niggling little details that may throw you off the scent at first. For example, the trim tool appeared to not work at all. We would line up the time line to the frame boundary we wished to cut and the trim tool would not work (we then found that the tool would only make cuts a quarter of a second or more from the marker).
MainActor does have a very good range of transition effects and is quite strong when it comes to adding titles to your work. 3D text can be created quite simply and rendered and -flown" across the display for a professional look. We did have the occasional crash from the program but then Premiere is pretty darn shaky itself so we really could not complain too much. Capture and output quality were excellent and although we could not directly control the Sony, our Panasonic stand-in proved to work fine; we were able to manually operate the Sony to record and capture. The final results showed very good colour depth and we found the text renders were cleaner than those produced by Ulead. We did not detect any of the compression artefacts that were present on the Ulead output.
The software kit does not end with the two video editing programs, the Swann also shipped with SuperGoo, a real-time morphing tool, Kai's PhotoSoap2, image editing software, and a neat CD called VideoWorks that graphically takes the novice through the whole process from creating a storyboard to the final output of the finished movie.
If we had to complain about any aspect of the package it would be the documentation. Admittedly, installation is quite simple and the Ulead product, for example, includes live online documentation. However, a novice may be intimidated by the simple photocopied pages outlining the installation and the three-page quick start guide. MainActor is supplied with a 114-page manual but it is not a patch on the Premiere manual, for example, and could do with improvement in both content and layout.
It is worth noting that if you already have editing software that you are familiar with and wish to continue using, Swann have a Starter Kit that does not include MainActor which will only set you back $199.
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