If you're serious about working with the digital video you've shot, ADS's PYRO ProDV bundle at AU$1284 is stuffed full of tools to help you edit like a pro.
Best of all, more than just throwing a bunch of extra software in the box, ADS and Ulead--with the help of Microsoft's long-awaited standard FireWire/DV device drivers--have developed a hardware/software combination that works seamlessly together under Windows 98 Second Edition or Windows 2000. Once installed, the PYRO hardware just works and lets you get down to business editing and making great videos.
ADS PYRO ProDV, along with a digital video camcorder, is literally all you need to create professional video projects. Digital video's image quality rivals other professional formats and stays first generation through editing--except when creating transitions, graphics, titles, etc.--which lets less expensive products deliver output comparable to top professional systems that cost thousands of dollars. Admittedly, the bundled Media Studio Pro editor can't deliver all of the features nor the fast, efficient editing of systems that cost ten or a hundred times more, but the people watching your videos never have to know that.
The bundle gets even better from there. Sonic Foundry's Sound Forge is the veritable industry standard in audio editing and its Acid Style 2.0 offers loop-based and royalty-free background music that can be edited to any time length you need. Martin's Hash's Animation Master is an excellent spline-based 3D character animation tool used by professionals at all levels of production. Likewise, the Boris FX is the same effects tool that's bundled with those professional editing systems, which cost ten to a hundred times more. Altogether, the value of the bundled software, if purchased separately, would cost you around AU$3000.
The PYRO 1394 card is a PCI card that includes two FireWire ports, which let you attach your camcorder and another IEEE-1394-compliant device, such as a Western Digital 1394 hard drive. Since both the ADS board and 1394 hard drives are relatively new, it will take some time before thorough testing of different computer configurations is done, but initial trials show that capturing directly from a camcorder to a FireWire hard drive has been successful.
A successful piece of video-capture hardware should go unnoticed after installation. And that's the case with ADS's PYRO card, if you're working with Windows 98 SE or Windows 2000. With Microsoft's standard 1394 drivers in place, you'll be able to capture, including batch capture, using Ulead Media Studio's video-capture module, assemble clips in the video editor module, and output directly to a DV device. While this is happening, the PYRO card will quietly do its job in the background.
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