#PAR
Adam,
The MultiPro CTV is a VGA to NTSC or PAL converter. It does a pretty good job
for the price. Be forewarned that there is color bleeding with intense colors,
especially reds and greens (blue doesn't seem to cause problems for me yet) and
larger fonts are a must..like the ones you see in WinCIM. But color bleeding
and
font size is less of a problem if you use the S-connector and a good S-VHS
deck.
And to my eyes, which love laserdisc quality, the FLIs and FLCs look pretty
darn
good. You should experience no flicker if your screen refresh is 60 hz. It will
work
with 16.7Million colors but they advise 640×480 resolution. There are overscan
and underscan controls and a screen adjust control. It's completely outboard
and
doesn't require software but they do provide a floppy with a software program
for
those who don't have VGA boards. They include all the connectors you need,
even an RF choke. I only connect mine when I'm videotaping..the connectors very
easily slide on and off, but you don't want your monitor continually connected
all the time because of color bleeding and blurriness, an artifact of the
conversion
process. Your video signal will be quite clear compared to what you see on your
computer monitor screen while you are converting VGA to NTSC. I got mine for
$244.95 from MicroWarehouse and was quite surprised that it works so well for
the
price. I thought I'd have to spend $700 at least to get the quality I was
looking
for (just for basic VHS recording..nothing fancy) from the impression some
magazine articles had left me.
I asked about the PAR board from users of it at tonight's Animation SIG and was
told once again that it is fine for limited use. But I was told by a couple of
people
not to expect great video for more than one minute's worth of material. Also,
some
hard-drives cause drop outs and other problems as they recalibrate and even the
newer drives can't be loaded to capacity. One guy uses a Micropolis 2017 and
can't get more than 1 gig of storage with it before running into glitches.
Theoretic-
ally, he should be able to use 1.5 gig of the @1.7 gig hard-drive. And also,
certain
animations cause it to drop the "Q" factor dramatically. lowering resolution. I
think
I got that right. The "6 minutes" figure I quoted before was inaccurate. Jon
Tyndal
was there tonight and said he's hasn't been able to do more than 5 minutes and
only gets great video quality up to 60 seconds. (He's the developer of
"Sparks")
He qualified his comments by saying he had an older, smaller hard-drive. About
540 meg, I think.
Dale Myers has only seen them used, he stores his animations to exabyte using
Abacus and takes the tapes to a local production house to convert to 1 inch.
These are folks who do this stuff for a living and are heavy into Lightwave and
Amiga programs.
Hope that helps a bit in your decision process.
Kevin