The Great DV Shootout 2003
By popular demand, here's the first published shootout between the three hottest DV products on the market today, the RT.X100 from Matrox, DVStorm2 Plus from Canopus and Pinnacle's Pro-ONE RTDV. In our unique format, a representative from each company makes comments extolling their product's virtues while criticizing their competitors, and then DMN's referee Charlie White offers his opinion in response to each comment after testing the systems for weeks on end. Here's where you can find out what's really happening with all these great systems, all in one place.In this competition, all three hardware cards are teamed up with Adobe Premiere 6.5 to bring you real time editing and DV output for around $1000. The boards and software are powerful and versatile, letting you capture and edit video from DV, S-Video and composite, and then output your finished video productions to any of those formats in real time. This product comparison focuses on all aspects of these systems, including real time effects, image quality, DV I/O, usability, configurability, overall speed, and price/value. In addition to our rigorous testing, the representatives from each company offered three volleys of email in a "debate" format. First, each company, in 200 words or less, explained the virtues of its system. Then, I showed these statements to the others and allowed each company rep 200 words to react to the others' statements. After I showed those next statements to the others, each product manager made a final comment. After each comment, I offer my take on what was written, after I've gone into each system and tested to see if the remarks are accurate, in my opinion.
Although some may complain about Adobe Premiere 6.5, I think it's a powerful editing software package. Its new version 6.5 boasts real time preview capabilities, and on a high end machine, the results are usable, but not great for real time ease-of-use. If you really want to get the most out of Premiere, one of these comparatively low-cost DV accelerator cards we're testing here is certainly the way to go. All are now capable of real time DV input and output, and all are a bargain, considering that you'd pay around $500 just for the full version of Premiere. That a great deal, considering that just a few years ago you would have paid tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for these exact same capabilities.
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The big selling point here is real time effects. The impact of real time functionality can't be stressed enough -- it makes all the difference in the world to be able to see the result of your effects with real time feedback. For example, it's difficult to estimate how long a text overlay should appear until you've actually seen it in place, and if you can do that in real time, you're able to see for yourself how well it fits into your segment without waiting a few minutes for each attempt. This translates into true user-friendliness -- there's nothing more tedious than waiting for a simple dissolve to render, for instance, while a paying client is breathing down your neck. Keeping that in mind, all the test videos in this article utilized only real time effects -- nothing you see in any of the QuickTime examples required any rendering at all. And, this year, each of the entries are able to output their real time files to DV in real time as well. We tested those capabilities, too.
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