#HELP. VIDEO TAPE OUTPUT
9 messages in this thread
Recall that D1 output is now a possibility for under $3000 including the
hardware and software required. Of course, the method I refer to is the use of
an EXB-8500 tape drive to write Abekas compatible digital video tapes. The
results will certainly be better than Hi-8, SVHS, laserdisk, or just about any
other method.
ASDGTechSupport;
I am very new to tape output. I have not done one yet.
Please explain what a D1 output is, and also the Abekus compatible video tape.
Does this require a special tape player to play the tape back?
Please explain anything else someone like me (new to video) would not
understand.
Thanks.
Dennis
D1 is the original digital video standard (since it came out, many others have
followed from different manufacturers). In pixel terms, D1 is 720 by 486 pixels
(NTSC). It is a digitized CCIR 601 video signal.
The advantages of digital recording for video are much the same as that for
audio…the promise of the Nth generation tape being identical to the 1st
generation. D1 devices usually look *great*.
For a 3D Studio owner, the benefit of recording via our driver (which creates
Abekas compatible D1 tapes), is very much one of cost – at $495 for the
software driver and $2100 for the tape drive (and the cost of an Adaptec ASPI
SCSI disk controller) you have a frame accurate single frame recorder which
never shows dropouts, has D1 quality and resolution, can be randomly accessed
(reading), and is portable to many other formats by making use of service
centers located throughout the US.
As has been stated by others here, the cost of single frame analog recording
equipment includes at least $5000 for a low end single frame recorder, some
amount for an animation controller, a thousand or more for a frame buffer, and
perhaps still more for time base correction and other video hardware. After
spending all that, you still don't have a high end result.
The down side of writing Abekas tapes is that the tape drive cannot provide
real time play back. So, animations must be motion tested in some other way.
Perhaps using quarter screen standins, or using other techniques. Once you are
happy with the animation, it can be rendered frame by frame to Abekas tape.
Each frame takes about 6 seconds to record.
Please let me know if there's any other information you'd like.
Regarding Exabyte support:
Is the only way to write files to the tape in batch mode? Or can you write each
frame to the tape as it is rendered?
James
In the first release of the driver, it will not snoop the file system looking
for images to write to tape (as they are rendered). This was considered but
then we realized that 3D Studio – one of the main applications this driver was
written to support – is not a Windows app yet so running our driver and 3D
Studio at the same time was not possible anyway.
Future releases will probably add this feature.
Printing a batch of images can be run in the background, however. Freeing your
machine to do other things quite reasonably.
>> In the first release of the driver, it will not snoop the file system >>
looking for images to write to tape (as they are rendered). This was >>
considered but then we realized that 3D Studio – one of the main >>
applications this driver was written to support – is not a Windows app >> yet
so running our driver and 3D Studio at the same time was not possible >>
anyway.
Well, you could always have 3DS rendering files out to a network drive and have
a machine running your driver collecting files out of the network.
????
You should look into simply making it either an IPAS or in the form of a DOS
application which can take a file name as a parameter on the command line. It
would be very simple then for us users to write a batch file calling your app
from VideoPost.
Ang