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Desktop
Video trip
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Bob
Doyle is New Media Magazine's video guru and
director of the Desktop Video Group, a loose
affiliation of desktop video users and enthusiasts
in the Boston area. As such he has access to some
cool equipment, and a couple of weeks ago Bob
showed me some of his current projects.
One
of the coolest things he had was a Sony w9000. This
is a 50 inch, LCD rear projection display screen
that conforms to the 16:9 aspect ratio of HDTV.
This monitor has no tuner, but that's no big deal
at the moment since there's no HDTV being
broadcast. The device is surprisingly light, and
not that deep, though it is, of course, pretty
wide. It stands on a pedestal which doesn't place
it very high off the ground, so if you're used to
large projection screen televisions this one looks
like the top half has been cut off. The screen is
at about the right height for viewing from a couch,
but in a conference room it would have to be raised
up several feet. The nominal resolution is 1068 x
480, and there are three video inputs and two RGB
inputs.
One
slight problem was immediately apparent; in a room
with sunlight streaming in through several windows
the image is not nearly as bright as a regular
television. It's still watchable, just a little
dim.
Bob
had a DVD player connected to the monitor, and we
briefly looked at a few discs as a demonstration.
This wasn't a true test; we didn't have another
monitor set up to compare the image, and we just
played a couple of discs at random from a limited
selection. Still, the image quality seemed
impressive. It was interesting to watch a movie
that was shot in Cinemax on a widescreen monitor;
you still get a fair amount of
letterboxing.
We
also watched some regular 4:3 television. You can
either watch this "curtained" (with black either
side of the image) or you can zoom the image to
fill the screen and crop the top and bottom of the
image. This points to an interesting problem for
existing television content when/if HDTV becomes a
reality; will old programs be "zoomed and scanned"
or will it be broadcast in the 4:3 aspect
ration?
The
w9000 would be a great little toy to have, but at
$7,500 it's not a casual purchase. Too bad this was
only a review unit and had to go back!
Bob
also demonstrated EditDV, the Radius DV editing
solution. He's using it on a G3 233 Mac (and here I
was thinking I'd have to buy a G3 300!) Bob's very
excited about DV, and the camera he's currently
recommending is the Sony TRV-9. This digital
camcorder, while it's not a professional unit, does
have one unique feature; it has analog inputs. With
this camera you can transfer existing video content
to DV tape.
This
really surprised me. I thought manufacturers had
specifically not added this functionality to DV
equipment because they were worried about the
reaction from Hollywood. When I asked Bob about
this he said he thought Sony had slipped it in and
were waiting to see if anyone would
notice!
I
don't know if that's true, but this camera is worth
checking out; and you should be able to get one of
these for much less than the "list" price of
$2,200.
I
got a quick demo of EditDV, which I hadn't seen
before. Bob had been busy editing a tape made of an
amateur performance of the musical "Oklahoma." He
had edited together an opening sequence which was
truly impressive. Superimposed on a shot of a
closed curtain, the letter O grew on the screen and
then the word Oklahoma slid across the screen. What
was impressive about this was that the lettering
was actually a matte for another video shot of a
chorus number from the show. This was all done in
the EditDV application.
EditTV's
interface is very different from Premiere 4.2, the
application I currently use. In addition to a
timeline interface, EditDV adds a Monitor window
that displays two video windows; source and
program. Multiple clips can be added to the source
window/bin, and then you select clips from the
source bin and add them to the "program." The
interface is very similar to Avids' interface, and
EditDV even copies many of the key strokes from
Avid.
[Note:
Premiere 5.0 has also added this
interface.]
We
also talked briefly about hard disks, and what you
need when editing DV. Bigger is always better; if
not necessary. I just bought a 5,200 rpm Seagate
Elite 9GB drive and am intending to use that for
editing DV. Bob has previously recommended 7,200rpm
drives for digitizing video, but with the 3.6 MBs
transfer rate of DV he agreed that a 5,200 rpm
drive becomes useable. A friend is using the same
drive, and has found that the drive is generally
able to keep up; though as the drive gets full the
transfer rate starts to drop below the required
rate. Fortunately, if you have enough RAM available
the transfer application can buffer the extra
data.
You
can find out more about the Desktop Video Group at
their website: <www.dtvgroup.com>
Michael
D. Murie has been a multimedia consultant and
developer since he first saw HyperCard in 1987. He
has written for New Media magazine and worked on
the CD-ROM The Jack Kerouac ROMnibus. He wrote the
books "Macintosh Multimedia Workshop" and
"Macintosh Multimedia Starter Kit" and was
co-author of "The QuickTime HandBook." He can be
reached at mmurie@m2w.net.
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