The Great DV Shootout 2003
Page 6 of 14
Charlie's Comments:Pinnacle Pro-ONE RTDV does offer some unique features in this group of editing systems. It's the only one that can execute native MPEG-2 editing, and it certainly is the only one with real time motion tracking. I was highly impressed with this motion tracking module that Pinnacle has lifted from its Commotion compositing and rotoscoping software. Even though it's rather primitive compared to high-end versions (a la Discreet) of this tool, I found a wonderful use for it -- lens flares. The problem with lens flares is that they always look so fakey unless they also track the camera movement. Well, here is the way to do a great lens flare, with the Pro-ONE's motion tracking
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| Click for QuickTime movie -- Pro-ONE RTDV has a great way to do lens flares |
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| Pinnacle Pro-ONE RTDV's motion tracking dialog box |
As for the Image Stabilizer, I was definitely nonplussed by this last year when I first took a look at it. Although this newest update is a slight improvement over the first version of Pro-ONE's stabilizer, it's still pretty lame. It accomplishes stabilization by digitally zooming in on the video, and then picking points on which to reference its stabilization. I picked one of my shots where I hadn't used a tripod -- a wide shot of an art museum -- and after running the stabilizer on it, it was less shaky, but the resolution was worse and it had some weird-looking banding/moiré on diagonal slats that are part of the building's architecture. The stabilization is billed as real time, but it really isn't, because the software must still "analyze" the shot before it determines its stabilization strategy. This can take a while -- on our five-second test clip, the process took 21.1 seconds to "analyze." Rendering? Yep. The result is video that might be barely usable if you're desperate, but of extremely low quality. In the industry's high end, this technique works better on film footage, high-rez stuff where you can stand to down-rez a bit and then recover some of that resolution with sophisticated frame interpolation schemes. This is not that.
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I used Pinnacle's slow motion on quite a few shots. I'm a fan of speed changes, so I looked at this feature closely on all three cards. I though Pinnacle's slow motion was the least good of the three, but it was still a vast improvement over what the company offered in last year's model. So, I'd call the Pro-ONE's slow and fast motion usable, but not excellent. If I had to choose, I'd rather use Pinnacle's fast motion than its slow motion, but neither is as smooth as I'd like to see.
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| Click graphic for enlargement -- Pinnacle's pleasantly designed dialog boxes are a joy to work with. Here's the picture-in-picture dialog box. |
The stunning Hollywood FX? I was not stunned. The Hollywood effects are great fun and whimsical, but there are two problems with this: 1) the effects are aliased, looking jaggy unless you turn on antialiasing, but then it takes about five minutes to render a two-second effect with a 2.53GHz P4 processor. 2) I'm not sure when you would want to use such effects -- I mean, they would be funny to use as a joke, and I called some of my colleagues over to my desk to see some of these things flying around (we liked the "Rubik's Cube" the best), but I sincerely hope I am never tempted to actually use one of these in a real production for a paying client. If I do, please, somebody fire me.
Using these kinds of effects might signal to your audience that you are either hypercreative, have a screw loose, or desperate. And, some of them don't quite work, like the one that looks like a twisted up noodle casts odd shadows on the screen, and a few of them crash Pro-ONE and Premiere in the worst possible way. That said, I admire the configurability of these effects, and wish they would all work in real time with antialiasing cranked up to the max. Then they would be stunning. As they are, they just made me feel numb, like a post-stunned feeling. And, I didn't like how there were some that wouldn't work at all unless I paid to upgrade to the Pro version, a tease that I think Pinnacle could have easily avoided just by leaving the effects that don't work out of the dialog boxes. But don't feel bad, Pinnacle -- the Xplode effects that Canopus sent along with its DVStorm2 didn't work very well, either -- all had to be rendered. None would play back in real time, because of dropped frames.
Then there's another bone I have to pick with the Pro-ONE RTDV: There's no real time chromakey capability. Sure, you can still use Premiere's chromakey controls, but you'll have to render them and they're not any damn good, especially for DV. In our test chromakey clip (the easiest one to chromakey we have here), using Premiere's green screen transparency setting it took 19 seconds to render a ten-second chromakey segment, and there was not very good matte cutting around the feathery edges of her hair. It's tough to make changes on this, too, because you can't see anything on your NTSC monitor -- it's all in the tiny Premiere dialog box. Not good.
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