CompuServe Thread

Hi Patrick, >> I've been talking things over with the guy we buy things from and he's got me a little confused (he's more of a salesman than a technical kind of guy). Basically, Linear editing is for "Live" type editing, where the computer is acting as either another "video deck" or as just a signal processor, right? Non-linear I understand as having all your video on the hard drives and you compile your a/b rolls in the cpu, then link it back to video. << Sorry it took so long to get back to you on this. I hve been hard at work on a job offer so I have been off line for a few weeks. But what the heck better late than never eh?? OK the diference between Linear and Non-linear or NLE. Your explination of linear editing is fairly narrow. What you are talking about is a live switching enviroment wich in actuality could be concidered a linear editing session. But to expand on it a little, linear and NLE are targeted more towards post production than it is live switching. The best way to look at it is this. In linear editing you are editing your footage from tape. You shuttle the tape back and forth, find you clips, mark the in and out points and add your transitions. You then preview your clips and make adjustments to the timing of your transitions, audio timing etc… It becomes time consuming since everytime you want to preview an edit you have to sit and wait for the decks to roll to the right piont in the tape to preview the edit. Now with Non-linear editing you no longer edit your footage from tape. You dump the footage to a hard drive and edit it from there. The editing process is still the same ie. find clips, mark clips, add transitions, preview, adjust. The big advantage is you no longer have to wait around for decks to preroll for each preview, you now have instant access to any piont in your footage. You also avoid the degredation of the tape that builds up while suttle through a tape in a linear session. Once it is digital on a hard drive it just a bunch of ones and zeros that don't change. Now of course all of thees nice advantages come with dissadvantages as well ( don't you just hate when that happens :-))) The major problem with non-linear is the amount of storage that you need to hold all of you information, meaning you footage. Now almost all of the NLE systems out there will give you variable compresion ratios for the footage that you are going to digitize to the hard drive. The more you compress the more you can put on thr hard drive, but the trade off is the quality of you digitized footage. The more you compress the footage the worse the quality becomes. In short….you get to dance the quality vs. storage space shuffle :-)). There are a few systems out there that define themselves as HYBRID SYSTEMS. To name a coupple there is the FAST VM with DPR and the MATROX STUDIO. These hybrid systems will alow you to edit either linerar or non-linear, I am not shure about the Matrox system but the FAST VM with DPR will also alow you to mix and match linear and non-linear footage as well as combine footage of diferent compression rations into the same project. Now the big advantage of a hybrid system is as follows. Lets say that you have a very long project to do and you don't have enough hard drive space to store it at an acceptible quality level, due to the need for a high compression. What is a editor like you to do in such a hopless situation??? Well with you hybrid system you throw quality out the window and put the footage on the hard drive with a very high compression ratio. Now you edit you footage with all the speed advantages of working with digital footage ( this is also called an off line editing session) Now you have your footage all editied together but the quality realy sucks since you had to compress at such a high ratio, but wait a minute were working with a hybrid system…. so we tell the system to go ahead and put our project together and record it out to the master, BUT we tell it to take the footage form our cammera tapes that we put in the players instead of using the digital footage that has poor quality. In this case we got the time saving advantages of a non-linear edit session as well as the higher quality of a analog signal. >>The reason I ask this, is because maybe we should go with the Alladin first as a non-linear system, then eventually get the FAST for the linear. Most of the video post-production stuff is only going to be using this new system (whatever we get) and I only forsee it being 2 minute segments max. What do you think?<< That is a question that I am not realy qualified to answer. I say this because I am not realy familiar with the Aladin. I have seen the output and DVE's from the system and I was blown out of the water by it. The 3D DVE's that it has are only rivaled by those seen on network TV, as a matter of fact I would bet that alot of them you see are generated by the Aladin. On the other hand I don't know what the editing interface is like, or if the aladin even supplies an edit controller or if you need to add a third party controller such as a TAO, or Future Video controller. As far as the FAST system goes I have worked with it in a linear enviroment for over a year now and would recomend it to anyone. The interface is very straigh forward and easy to use. Fast is working on a interface with the Aladin ( it might even be released already ) that will alow you to add Aladin effects directly to the VM timeline. I guess my answer would be this. If you know that in the future you want both a VM and an Aladin, look into the Aladin and see if you need to supply a third party edit controller. If you do then I would pick up the VM. Latter when you add you Aladin you will already have the edit controller with the VM. Instead of buying the Aladin with a diferent edit controller that you will have to try to unload down the line when you add you VM. You first step though, should be to go out and buy a ski mask and look for a bank with very lax security :-)))) Hope this helps, Michael W. Towe Falcon Video Productions Santee Ca. -Michael W. Towe