Canopus DVStorm, Page 3
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| [Click for larger image] Storm Navi makes it easy to batch capture all your clips |
My favorite Canopus app is called Storm Navi. What a great innovation! It's an automatic logger that finds the beginning of each shot, marks ins and outs on an entire tape's worth if shots and delivers a batch capture list to you. Then, you take that list into Storm Edit and capture all your footage. Careful, though -- you'll need to allow some pad at the beginning of the first shot, or Storm Edit's capture utility will get confused and lose its place on the tape. This concept will be familiar to those of us who come from the linear tape world and wish we had rolled some bars at the beginning of the tape because there's not enough time code before the first shot for a decent pre-roll. Overall, Navi is a delight, and can prove itself to be a tremendous worksaver.
What about the hardware? DVStorm only takes up one slot inside your computer, and it's easy to install. That is, if you have an IRQ available on your machine. Since Canopus designed DVStorm to the PCI 2.1 spec, the card wants its own IRQ, unlike PCI version 2.2 boards which can cooperate with other devices on the same IRQ. Hey, I thought we had settled this IRQ mess a long time ago! When I get into IRQ Hell, that's when I really want to scoot over to the other side of the Midwest Test Facility and settle in with a Mac and Final Cut Pro. Well, part of the solution to this IRQ confusion was the modification of the PCI 2.1 spec to the new version 2.2. Anyway, this little "feature" caused our attempted installation on a mighty Intergraph dual-proc Pentium III Xeon 550 to fail. But when we presented the card to our Dell, all was right with the world. A quick note here -- there have been numerous compatibility issues with DVStorm, so you will certainly want to find out if your computer is one of the "problem machines" before jumping into this system. For example, Dell workstations have caused lot of problems with DVStorm, but Dell's Dimension series seems to work fine. Again, please look before you leap. It'll take a call to Canopus tech support to do this, too, because unfortunately there's nothing on the Canopus Web site about computer compatibility -- a major oversight given the pickiness of this hardware.
