Tuesday, December 02, 2003

DV Editing

Well, after all of the difficulties that I've had working with the ATI All-in-Wonder card... the audio slippage, ridiculous drivers, pops and clicks... I'm looking into some other method for off-loading my old VHS tapes into digital format. What looks probable is the Canopus ADVC-100 which is a little external box that converts analog video signal into the DV format (hooks to the PC using Firewire/IEEE3894). Gets good reviews, simple operation, only costs $260ish and I won't have to fight with a lot of the issues that I did with the ATI AIW card.

DV video size is moderately large (25 megabits/sec) and requires around 15 Gb/hr. That means I'll want to have around 75-100 Gb scratch space for capture. MJPEG editing was around 10 Gb/hr at quality level 9/10. (Previous mention of MPEG1 data rates and MJPEG rates.)

Promise just released a 4-port SATA raid controller which would allow me to have a mirrored system drive as well as a dedicated capture drive (non-mirrored). Pricing for the card is $66 at TheNerds.net.

The Seagate Barracuda SATA-150 120Gb drives are only $110 now. (I believe those are the "quiet" drives.)

I'll also need to change-over from a desktop case to a mini-tower case (probably will look at 2CoolTek and see what they have).

Total budget for the drives, the Canopus thingy, the case and another stick of memory (to get me to 1Gb) is going to be around $800-$900... so I won't be doing anything until I get paid for the last job that I did on the side.

posted by Wuphon's at 6:47 AM