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Review : Pinnacle Pro-One RTDV Part 1
Move over Hollywood ! Here comes true Realtime video editing for the masses. The masses with money that is . Priced at 1099 US$ this is not exactly a cheap card but it offers value for the money. But I got one ... and here is what I found out about it.
Pinnacle has released version 2.0 of the Pro-One. Minor hardware changes but a lot of new software. At the same time they have released the Pro-One RTDV. A souped up Pro-One card with lots of extra hardware on board and additional software.
The
kit contains, besides the Pro-One RTDV card , The breakout box ,
a Firewire cable , an audio loopthru cable , the driver CD-ROM,
Pinnacle Impression SE DVD authoring software , A time limited version
of Commotion , Adobe Premiere 6.0 full version , Adobe Photoshop
5.0 LE , and Sonic Desktop's Smartsound for Premiere.
Extensive documentation and user guides are provided as well.
For people buying before end October a free update to Impression DVD Pro is available. An upgrade to Adobe Premiere 6.5 is available for 19$
The supplied material is so extensive that this will be a multi-part review. This part handles the hardware and installation . second part will take a look at all the software.
The Board
That is of course what it is all about. This is the engine that does all the video related work.
This full length PCI card hosts impressive hardware. Besides the connectors to the breakout box and Firewire ports not much can be seen from outside the computer.
On the card are : A multiformat ( Pal and NTSC ) video A/D ( CCIR 601 Digital Video bus ) and D/A convertor , a stereo Audio A/D and D/A, an SAA7146 Multimedia bridge from Philips, the DVexcel video processor from LSI logic ( Formerly C-Cube ) and memory, an S3 Savage VGA processor with accompanying memory, and last but not least a hardware DV codec from Divio. Furthermore on the board you will find multiple Firewire controllers. One is used to deliver 2+1 Firewire port to the world ( 2 on the backplane , one internal ) The other Firewire controller is used exclusively by the DV codec and taps in to the Firewire bridge on the card on one side and the video bus on the other side. Two programmable gate arrays hold custom hardware to perform various tasks like overlay insertion.
The Difference with the Standard Pro-One is the presence of the Divio DV codec. On a Standard Pro-One you have to save the output to an AVI file to send it later from disk to the Firewire tapedeck. The computer cannot handle video in both directions in real time. With the RTDV the DV encoding is done on the Card and sent directly to the Firewire ( over the secondary controller, to the primary, to the deck )
The card processes all video digitally ( CCIR 601 bus ). Any video source whether Analog , from a file via PCI bus , or coming from a Firewire stream through the Divio chip is transformed into a CCIR601 stream on the card. The on Board Video Card also generates directly a CCIR stream , so any Overlay ( tiles ) or computer animated image is directly available. The DVexcel chip mixes all the video streams and applies the effects and transitions, assisted by Gate array 2. The DVexcel is a computer on its own. Internally it has a Microsparc processor surrounded by effect hardware and running a dedicated program. The Microsparc is in essence a Sparc processor as used by Sun in their workstations.
The output of the DVexcel is again available as a CCIR601 channel and is simultaneously sent to the video D/A convertor, the PCI bus for storage on disk , and the Divio Dv codec for output on Firewire. Everything is at all times available at all places on the board. In essence the electronics does all the video processing and is capable of handling all of it in real time.
The DVexcel also runs the MPEG2 compression engine. This is Realtime only when the DVexcel is doing nothing else ! When it is inserting effects it can not devote time to MPEG compression and then the speed drops to below real time. The hardware MPEG2 CBR and single pass VBR compressor on board comes with presets for the most common used formats : VCD , SVCD , DVD and 16:9 DVD. But it can be set up to anything you like. It offers full control over quantization scales , GOP structure and other MPEG settings.
The size of the card is just big enough to hold all of the electronics. More stuff had to be mounted on the back side of the board because it wouldn't fit. Because of its size the board requires a full size computer. Forget about putting it in one of those superslim desktops.
I Connected the analog video and audio up to a small TV set next to my computer monitor. Everything I do in Premiere I can see in real-time on the TV, sound included. In 99% of the cases there is no rendering whatsoever. The only rendering required is when you have a static overlay ( title ) the 'bleeds' into a 3d transition. Then Premiere has to render the Static overlay as a strip of AVI video and dump it to the card. Premiere 6.5 claims to be able to solve this as it can be done in background while you are still editing.
Installation
The installation goes pretty smooth ... provided you have a correct system to start with. The Board requires its own interrupt and can not share with other devices. I ran into trouble with my video machine and had to buy a new motherboard. The manual explains in detail what you need as a machine.
Requirements :
(...)
