#Sanyo
25 messages in this thread
We at Videomedia find the deck severly lacking in many ways. The most obvious
is the lack of mechanical robustness. The deck may "work" to someones
particular limited expectations but the real question is "for how long". When
one has other relative low budget choices for very little more money one should
seriously consider the long term investment logic in choosing the Sanyo. We are
not talking about something that can be made better with simple software fixes,
we are talking about the very foundation upon which the house is built. One can
be "penny-wise and pound foolish".
Regards,
Bill Stickney V.P. Engineering
Bill,
You're beating your head against a brick wall in trying to rationally review
this deck. Obviously everyone who has reviewed the deck agrees with your
findings. The notion that this deck is the end all solution is unfounded and
for the most part is just sales hype. Our early review of the deck resulted in
the exact same opinion as the one you've voiced. We've now seen the deck in use
at three different locations and we managed to dump alot of frames out to it.
In addition to it's obvious lack of durable components, the output is
prosumer/low end industrial. No bias, just the facts.
Paul
Paul,
I've been following all of the threads regarding the Sanyo deck and I haven't
heard what better choice there is for the money. In your opinion, what deck
would you suggest to a poor architect who wishes to save a few animations to
SVHS tape? I just need to record / view previews because I believe my Exabyte
tape unit can be utilized for sending out for D1. I want the ability to hand a
client the preview tape if he wants it. I would record realtime off disk but
that looks just a little cheesier than I would prefer. Any suggestions would be
most appreciated.
Bob Ritger
Robert,
Believe it or not the Sanyo is not a bad deck. For the price it's probably a
really good deck. Most of the negative comments regarding the deck have stemmed
from outrageous claims about it being a 7750 replacement, and being able to
accept 10s of thousands of frames without any dropouts, jitter, etc. (Although
I believe the last note I saw, admitted that there was a minimum amount of
frame jitter, etc. which means we're at least getting a little more of the
truth.)
For the type of work you're talking about doing, my first guess would be that
the Sanyo will do fine, and more than likely by the time it wears out you'll be
wanting to move up to a higher level tape format anyway.
I actually have a couple of animators that I shell work out to, who are both
using the Sanyo.
As to similarly priced alternatives, the DPS unit is really nice and is alot
faster. We've played with one for a while now, and are going to be utilizing
several of them for preview purposes before we dump to tape. I believe Martin
Foster is really hyped on the DPS unit and can probably give you more input
about it. I also think I saw that Greg Pyros and his group were going to work
on a set of drivers for it. So they should both be able to help you out.
In the end your decision should probably be based on what you're going to use a
deck for. If you're just looking for a preview deck, then either the Sanyo or
one of the DPS units will probably work well. One of the big questions is where
is your client going to see the preview? Or are they going to see it? If you're
going to a service bureau for final output, then your choices are wide open,
all of the solutions will work for you. If you're planning on delivering a tape
directly to the client, then you have to consider which unit is going to
provide you with a cleaner picture when you finally get the thing to VHS. (Most
clients don't have SVHS
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capabilities.)
What type of frame buffer are you going to be utilizing? Have you ever dumped
frame accurate work to tape? Do you have a specific quality level in mind? All
of these questions would play a part in a deck reccomendation.
If it's all new to you, you're just looking primarily for a preview deck and
you don't have any delusions of generating SP or D2 quality off of a unit, I'd
say take a very serious look at the Sanyo. It's shipping, a number of dealers
have the unit running, and you can probably get a fairly good deal on it.
Paul
.
Paul,
golly Paul, you touched my hot button <g>! You have a DPS??? Do tell, do tell!
I'm so excited about it I'm considering buying a used Amiga just so I can have
one NOW! That would be complex and costly though, because I'd need a way of
networking with the Amiga etc. Don't have any money either, spent it on our
trip to Sydney. Do you think the DPS' output would suffice for corporate
clients? I've been doing a lot with 512×486 .tgas sent to an AG7750 via a
Targa+ 64 (not my equipment, I hasten to add) and the quality is pretty poor in
my eyes, although the client likes it. They won't pay for anything better and I
don't want to rock the boat by telling them they should be going via Vista and
transcoder to BetaSP because the output would look far better. We dump to svhs,
dub to D2 for editing, and the final output is typically laser disk which would
probably really benefit from the better quality master source. I have a feeling
that people like these would be happy with the output from the DPS and
overjoyed by it's convenience. What say you video-meister?
Martin,
Can't say much yet. See your e-mail!
Paul
Paul,
righto! Nudge, nudge, wink, wink. Say no more. A nod's as good as a wink to a
blind bat <g>.
Paul,
Thanks for the information!
Here's some more:
I'm frame bufferless at the moment. Would both the Sanyo and the DPS PAR
require a frame buffer? I think S-VHS tape would get me by for the next year
or two if I have the Exabyte option to go out of house for higher quality.
I've got a decent S-VHS home deck that I could record in VHS if that's what a
client preferred.
I haven't dumped frame accurate work to tape yet. I've been investigating what
it would take to get my company up to speed in computer animation for
architecture. We managed to get a great deal on 3ds about a year ago and its
been my labor of love to find out how to best integrate the software and also
the concept of animation into how we design buildings.
Thanks again,
Bob Ritger – The Hillier Group Architects
Hi Robert. I use a Sony SV0 9600 PRO, which has one or two advantages over the
Sanyo, like being able to do true insert edits, being Quickpass and Turbo
(V-LAN's multi frame per pass utility), and being a sturdier machine. It costs
@ $3200 (when I bought it, rumors of Sony price increases abound), but you have
to buy a VTR controller (RS422 flavored). I use a V-LAN Animax, $1250. This
combination is a bit more flexible, and can be included in an A/B roll edit
suite, something I'm considering for the future.
Matrox is coming out with MAX, a DPS PAR type unit that has an Illuminator Pro
frame buffer (on board CCIR-601 YUV) as part of the bundle and will do 30 fps/
60 fields per second without having to buy a "special" hard drive from DPS.
Any SCSI II Fast drive will do. It sounds like it'll be a real screamer, and
I'm going to test drive it as soon as possible.
Regards,
John Tissavary (La Luna cie)
slight correction: the hardrives for the DPS PAR need not be bought
from DPS, they are Seagate IDE drives and could be purchased from
anybody who sells them. I believe 2 drives are now approved a 500mb
and a 1.3gb. Also, I believe that the Matrox MAX has a list of drives
that are approved for use – meaning, probably not just any SCSI-II
drive would work.
Furthermore, I could get a DPS PAR, a hardrive, the capture board, an
Exabyte 8505, and an Australian vacation for LESS than the price of
the MAX alone (without hardrive even).
Ugh, sorry I'm starting to sound like a dealer, and I'm not, honest!
I'm just excited. I've just spent too much time examining that big
yellow, furry thing in image 24, in the r3 manual.
Robert,
as Paul said, I'm _very_ excited about the DPS Personal Animation Recorder
which is soon to be released for the PC (waiting on the software from Gus
Grubba <g>). It's been available for the Amiga for quite a while now and has
received rave reviews. For corporate/industrial work I don't see how it can be
beat _and_ if you have an Exabyte 8500/8505 (for when the output quality needs
to be the best) then you've got the perfect most cost-effective combo for any
situation, IMHO. You see, the DPS will take your rendered .tga files and build
a modified/optimized JPEG animation file on its dedicated harddrive (capacity
3-5 minutes) – kinda like a super-duper .fli file. This building process
doesn't take much longer than just copying them to the hardisk, and hopefully
Gus will find a way of rendering from 3ds directly to it in order to circumvent
that process completely. It's certainly going to be orders of magnitude faster
than recording frame-by-frame to a Sanyo – BTW, sounds like the Sanyo will
_not_ be able to make use of quickpass or multiple edit type technology. You
then have an animation which will play back in realtime and can be recorded to
any tape deck at genlocked 30fps (or 60 fields per second?). If you get a
glitch/dropout on the tape, just record it again in realtime – it's no big deal
(unlike relaying frame-by-frame, ugh)! Whoa, I'm excited! It has composite,
s-vhs and betacam/MII outputs and at maximum quality the output is pretty
stunning (5.5Mhz Video Bandwidth and >60dB S/N) and makes .fli/.flc files look
like doodoo <g,d&r>. I've never been happy with .flc files as a method of
previewing before committing to tape – you invariably miss something and catch
it later _after_ going to tape. The DPS should all but eliminate that problem.
The price is comparable to a Sanyo (about $2600 street) and you'll have a
faster method of doing previews and possibly a means of 1st-generation final
output to vhs, svhs or betaSP. For example, you could record to your home vhs
or svhs for a preview, get approval, then rent a betaSP recording deck for the
day to record final output. If JPEG output is not good enough (although I think
it will be in many cases) you'll have the .tga files on your regular harddisk
to backup to an Exabyte tape and lay to D1/D2/betaSP via Abekas. Personally,
I'll sooo happy to take frame-by-frame work completely out of my business, it's
a bloody minefield. The DPS might very well do it for me.
Gosh, you'd think I worked for DPS or something, but I just got excited,
honest. (calmer now). I have flyers on the Sanyo and the DPS – I'll fax one or
both, if you'd like (just e-mail your fax #).
Martin "in need of a nap now" Foster
Martin- I'm unfamiliar with the DPS PAR that you speak so highly of. It
sounds like it will be a godsend to us little people that don't have our own
post house to play with. Is this the same beast as the Bandit unit that was in
the Pyros booth at SigGraph. If not, is it better…worse…comparable. It
certainly sounds less expensive than the price I heard on the Bandit at
SigGraph. Any comments, Greg P. Also, will it only take .TGA's or can we take
advantage of r3's JPEG rendering and save some precious disk space?
One last question, is the 3-5 mins. you mentioned video time or the time that
it takes to do the JPEG conversion.
Thanks,
-Mark
>> Any comments, Greg P.
Always! The DPS PAR will hold 3-5 minutes of animation on an IDE 500
meg hard disk. The price will be around $2,500 or so with the hard
disk. Quality is excellent. We'll keep you posted!
the DPS PAR is a completely seperate product with a something of a
different approach and price point to the Bandit. Last I heard and
saw, the Bandit was $5995 (RAM and/or disk extra), is a complete
external box (including a PC and other proprietary hardware), and is
purported to be very high quality. The DPS PAR is also very high
quality, although I didn't do a side-by-side comparison, and is a
fraction of the price for an internal ISA card and a 500mb IDE drive
hooked directly to the card to bypass the ISA bus. If you want
capture capability for the DPS then you'll need to buy the optional
TBC board ($795 street). Matrox also has a very-high quality
offering called the MAX, but yet again you're looking at more than
double the price (around $6000, without drive). Actually, I'm not
sure how DPS can do it for that price <g>.
I prefer the DPS PAR because I really can't afford anything more and
it seems to offer me similar capabilities to the Bandit and the MAX
without the untouchable price point. It's like the Sanyo GVR-S950
versus Panasonic AG7750 dilemma – if you can't afford an AG7750 then
all comparisons are academic. I think the PAR will be a winner.
If I mentioned 3-5 minutes, I think I meant 3-6 seconds (per frame).
Sorry. Capture would be realtime. The method of compiling animations
to the DPS PAR's hardrive are up in the air at the moment and Gus
Grubba/Greg Pyros will be in charge of that. I would guess that you
would be able to do at least 2 things: compile .tga files (maybe
even jpeg'd files) from your regular hardrive to the PAR's; and,
render directly to the DPS via an ADI driver (VTPADI) which
circumvents the disk space isssue entirely. On the Amiga version, at
least, you could also do the reverse: reverse compile from the PAR's
drive to your regular drive, saving a sequence of 24-bit images. The
playback capabilities are pretty slick too, similar to aapro, and I
hope they add scripting capability so you can play animations in
sequence and with looping and transitions. Whoa, a wishlist already!
I'll fax the info if you want – I have one copy of the info.
oh, I misunderstood. 3-5 minutes is the typical capacity of a 500mb
drive when used with the DPS PAR. I believe a 1.3gb drive may have
been added to the list of supported drives. 6 seconds seems to be the
typical time to take a 24-bit image and compile it to the PAR's
drive. Rendering directly through ADI should be faster.
Martin- Thanks for the info. Sounds REALLY interesting. I'm anxious
to see what G&G come up with on the driver side. I've got a voice
call into Greg, but we're playing phone tag, but I think you've
covered the info pretty well. If you don't mind faxing me the cut
sheet you have on it, I would appreciate it. FAX (405)341-0308. Much
thanks.
Mark,
I'll fax it tonight or tomorrow.
Martin- Thanks for the fax. After reading it, I see why you're
excited. I'm anxious to see how it performs for you once you get
one. Keep us posted. I finally got ahold of Greg P. and he clued me
in on it some last night, but it's nice to have the specs in
writing. Thanks again.
Thanks a gig for faxing me the information on the Sanyo and the DPS
PAR units. If you were a dealer I'd buy from you with your amazing
response time.<g> I'm trying to compile my options so check this
please:
1. Sanyo GVR-S950 Price =$2,600
no controller needed
no Quickpass or Fastpass available
2 audio channel inputs
2. DPS PAR DR-2150 Price =$4000 (including the DPS TBC IV component
transcoding time base corrector card@$795 + the Seagate hard disk +
cosumer grade VCR@$700)
no additional controller needed
no Quickpass or Fastpass required
no audio input!!
3. Sony SV0 9600 PRO Price = $4,450 (including a V-LAN Animax rs422
VTR controller@$1250)
Quickpass / Fastpass available
audio input?
I would value your comments on the above list. I need to confirm the
audio input of each unit as I would like to add a soundtrack to any
tape I produce. To compare apples to apples which of the above units
do I need to add a video capture board? The PAR is covered in this
respect, right?
Thanks again for your help,
glad you got the info sheets. No, I'm not a dealer so I hope I can
give you unbiased help. Your list looks about right, except I don't
remember if you said you had a framebuffer. If not you'd need one to
use with options 1 and 3 (the editing VTR's) and you're looking at
$1700 (street) for a targa+ 16/32, up to $3695 (rarely discounted
much) for a Matrox Illuminator Pro CN4. There's a new Truevision
board called the TrueVista, too which should be similarly priced and
featured to the Matrox. The difference there is that you'd get a
max. recordable 32-bit resolution of 512×486 with the targa+ and,
more like 720 to 756×486 with the Matrox/Truevista.
I'm not sure about audio on the Sony SVO9600 but I'm reasonably sure
it's good. Many consumer vcr's in the higher range would allow you
to dub an audio track without affecting the video itself.
I've added the frame buffers to my list for the Sanyo and Sony. If I
needed to capture live video from a vcr then the DPS PAR / TBC IV can
do this without any more hardware, right? Do I need a graphics board
that accepts a feature connector? I hope not or I guess I gotta buy
a new board. Any way to get around this feature connector? I was
given a capture board for free a while back but I can't use it unless
I can connect it somehow without relying on my feature connectorless
viper card.
The SVO 9600 has 2 stereo audio inputs, and will record HIFI (on video
channel) or regular audio, but audio ch2 is reserved for LTC if used.
So you didn't have a frame buffer already? I'm glad I mentioned it
then – they aren't cheap.
you are right. The DPS PAR and the TBC IV (option) take the place of
a framebuffer/vtr controller/capture board – no other hardware is
necesary (except a ntsc TV/monitor to look at the output, of course).
This combo should be able to capture from any ntsc source. Other
capture boards (video for windows types) are something else and each
one may do this a little differently. I really don't know how they
work. I suppose some need a feature connector and an svga card
equipped with one, but some have their own display built in.
I just noticed the rest of your message about the video capture
option. With a frame-accurate vtr, vtr controller, and framebuffer
(truevision or Matrox etc) you can only do frame grabbing. This is
the same as frame dumping except in reverse, instead of laying a
frame you grab each frame. This is _very_ time consuming, since you
have the same old preroll situation. You can buy fairly decent Video
for Windows type capture boards like the Intel Indeo, which will
capture in realtime from a video source. Yet again, capture is a bit
of a headache with the grabbing technique so the DPS looks like a
good solution for that, too.