Serious Magic DVRack

[John Hewat]

Originally Posted by Dave Campbell

I use the Matrox APve and love it. It will work in a 8x PCIe slot also.

Glad you mentioned this - I've been wondering if I'd need a motherboard with dual 16x PCI Express ports (like the ASUS A8N 32 SLI Deluxe) because I plan to run it at the same time as a 7800GTX.

But knowing this, I can use a regular A8N Premium and fit the APVe in the 8x port.

[Dave Campbell]

Of course, I had to cut the connector.
Now, not all MB's bios may work so its not the right way to do it, but, for me, it was that or nothing. I was lucky it worked.

Dave

[Marco Leavitt]

Is this possible? In other words, I want to record the video via firewire, but the audio through a separate AD converter direct to disc. If so, what sort of equipment will I need?

[Seth Bloombaum]

Originally Posted by Marco Leavitt

...record the video via firewire, but the audio through a separate AD converter direct to disc.

Marco, you're wanting double-system sound. There are lots of good approaches to this, and good reasons to do it, especially with music.

First though, Rack will record whatever audio your camera is encoding into the firewire DV stream - that's the only way it works. And yes, it's compressed.

And you'll want that audio in the rack file, for sync reference if nothing else, because you're going to have to sync double-system audio in your NLE. It could be your camera mic, or a send from a sound operator with a boom, whatever makes it to the camera. Best is the sound op sends signal to your camera.

Second issue - getting the other, better audio recorded. This could be on any system from a mini disk to DAT to Marantz compact flash to Edirol R1 or R4 to Sound Devices 742 or 744 (or your PC, see below). Some have reported minor sync issues, but I've had VERY good experience with double system audio syncing correctly. Seems to me there was a long thread over in the "now hear this" forum a month or two ago on synching.

Third issue - what about recording separate audio on the same system as Rack is running on? Maybe, you'd have to test it. Depending on the system that may be too much processor load or disk access or maybe not. Rack keeps my laptop pretty busy by itself, but that's just a caution, I've not tested what you'd like to do, and your PC is different than mine. Lots of good AD converters / sound cards out there...

[Marco Leavitt]

Actually, we're already recording double system sound. I was hoping to get back to single system. :)

Too bad. I guess the technology isn't there yet, at least not at a price I can afford.

[Seth Bloombaum]

Yah, it's all about (H)DV right now - what will it do and what won't it do.

Now, you could bypass the camera preamps with an external DV25 encoder, but that's going to mean analog video to the encoder as well.

You're probably already getting the benefits of external mic preamps in your mixer and sending line level to the camera.

I've only shot one HDV project and it's nowhere near done, but I'm told that the mpeg compressed audio in HDV is better than what we get with DV25. Certainly the tapes I've sampled and logged sound great (my sound guy had something to do with that). The general plan is to use tape audio for voice and to sync the 2nd audio for music. All the audio was sourced from his mixer and outstanding M-S mic, going to a Z1 and his hd recorder.

I'm getting the idea that you're looking for a better workflow, which is always good, IMHO. Are you concerned with any particular obstacles with double system?

[Marco Leavitt]

We have sort of a rotating group of people of varying degrees of ability doing audio for us now. I was hoping to simplify the process to make it easier. For the last couple of dates we've actually had to record direct to camera just because we didn't have enough crew.

I think that a mixer does help when recording direct to camera, but still, you're never going to get that 20 dB of headroom no matter what prosumer cam you use.

[Christopher C. Murphy]

Hi, I was wondering if the new "Intel" Macbook Pro coming out will have what's needed to run HDV Rack?

Apparently, it's almost definate that the Macbook Pro will run Windows natively. That's the buzz I've heard..

Thanks..

[Boyd Ostroff]

Well it has an Intel CPU (and evidently motherboard too), but it's a Mac. Apple has said they aren't going to support Windows on their hardware, but they won't do anything to stop third parties from doing so. Microsoft has not made any promise to make Virtual PC available on the Intel Macs. It seems natural that someone will do this, but I haven't read about any commercial product that allows Windows to run.

So unless DV Rack wants to port their software to the Intel Macs (and in the past they said it was not practical to port to OSX) then you'd probably have to depend on some hack to get it working.

[Ben Freedman]

Howdy...

I've used DV Rack for a while, and today downloaded the HDV trial to use with my Dell 700m 2.0GHz laptop. I was expecting a difficult time, as the requirments suggest 2.0 as the minimum, an 3D graphics card. the Dell has merely the built-in intel graphics, which suck....

So, I was quite surprised to find that the default settings were quite usable with HDV rack, with not-too-much lag on the screen, and when I checked with the taskmanager during recorded, I was hovering around 50-60% CPU usage, which seems reasonable to me.

Am I doing something wrong? Or are the minimum specs just a little too conservative? Or, am I not capturing the right way, and really my computer is too slow? Basically, I just want to know that with the default settings, I'm capturing good m2ts without dropouts, etc...

Thanks for the info...

Ben..

[Keith Wakeham]

They say pentium 4 2.0 Ghz, your 700m is not a pentium 4 at all - it is a pentium-m based on centrino mobile architecture.

I have a inspiron 9200 with only a 1.6 Ghz pentium-m and it plays back HDV fine and even 720p h.264 smoothly in quicktime format which the minimum windows based requirements are as follows for 720p copy and pasted.

QuickTime 7 for Windows:

* 2.8 GHz Pentium 4 or faster processor
* At least 512MB of RAM
* 64MB or greater video card
* Windows 2000 or XP

Suffice to say Pentium-M architecture is way more powerful per clock and insanely more powerful per watt than P4.

If you check some cpu charts your 2.0 Pent-m will likely rate around a 2.6 - 2.8 Ghz P-4 in most benchmarks if memory serves correctly.

[Ben Freedman]

That's good to hear, as I've loved my 700m for SD recording with DVRack. Happy to make the transition to HDV...

I think my real query was regarding the lack of a video card. The 700m just has the on board intel video, which is far from wonderful in the 3d area. The serious magic site seems to suggest that a powerful GPU is a necessity...

No?

- Ben

[Travis Maynard]

I noticed that the main advantage of using DVrack is having all these great production tools in a very compact package, which would be a laptop. You can easily tote around you laptop to shoots and everything.

What has me confused is the site says that "DV Rack software is designed for maximum compatibility with standard PC's, laptops and cameras.

I took it that standard PC's meant desktops, so I guess that people have actually managed to use the software with a desktop pc? It seems that would be very hard, so I was interested in how people would setup their equipment to move with them while they are shooting? Or if it would just be used for still setups like in a room green screening without a whole bunch of movement?

Also, I would love to hear other people's setups with their laptops. I plan on using it with a dolly, but I'd say there are other setups. I just purchased one of the new Sony Vaio Intel Core Duo laptops and I'm going to order DVrack with my next paycheck.

I wanna get my mouth watering early. ;)

[Chris Davis]

Probably just the marketing department running on at the mouth! :)

Sure, DV Rack will work fine on a regular PC (that's where I tried the first demo), and I supposed you could set it up like that in a studio environment.

[Karl Soule]

I think the reason that is in there is because we frequently get calls from customers asking if it'll run on a desktop PC. Our older literature used to say it's "designed to run on a laptop" and I guess that confused some people.