CompuServe Messages

Hi David, I'll answer as best I can with the board that I am most familiar with, the FAST Movie Machine. 1) The Movie Machine does feature an overlay screen that shows you on your rgb monitor what it is recording to tape. 2) According to an article in New Media magazine these things will take up to about 21KB/frame. At that rate 30 minutes of video (hmmm did they take into account audio too?) would take just over 1.161 gig of hard drive storage. 3) I don't see any real recommendations for hard drives. I think pretty much any of todays drives can keep up with 21KB/sec. 4) Right, 30 frames per second is possible but not 60 fields per second with the Movie Machine 5) A unique feature of the Movie Machine is that it has two video inputs plus a TV tuner. Therfore, it may be possible to switch inputs on the fly while you are recording, however, I am not sure. Post processing of the clips is done through Adobe Premiere editing software which is bundled with it (in the m-jpeg option) 4 er. 6 🙂 I think something that can do clean "insert edits" (as defined by a flying erase head) would be very useful however, if you have your whole video on the harddrive, I would say that you could simple hit record, on any old deck, and then play on the Movie Machine and you will get a decent quality recording. 7) I think that it would be advanteous to have the better (read faster) video display boards as you will be drawing and redrawing frames often. 8) No. The output of the movie Machine will approach VHS at best. 9) I believe most of the recording/playback horsepower is on the Movie Machine board itself. The cpu of the computer is only called upon for creating wipes, titles, etc. "Are there any simple answers??" Yes, 3 is a good one I like to use. ;-> -John