Miro v. Fast vs. Videola
12 messages in this thread
Well, let's get this Forum rolling with one hot topic floating around
and for which there seems to be no definitive opinion. Yes, it's the debate
over the cheaper non-linear editing products and which is the best for the $$$.
I'm talking sub T2 prices such as the Videola Premium, Cardinal Snap Plus, Miro
DC1 TV and Fast Video Machine w/ MPEG option. Surely, these products are signs
of things to come. Sub $1,000 non-linear products for the PC. When I upgrade
to a bug free Pent 90 or 100 Motherboard I'm going to buy one of these boards,
or whatever might be available and better at the time (the age old
problem–keeping up with the "Groveses"). For now though, some straight, clear
answers would be helpful:
(1) Do any of these board compress on the fly and simultaneously allow you to
watch and control what is being compressed on to your hard drive (I think this
is called "overlay"??)?
(2) Can you realistically place 30 minutes (or more) of compressed digital
video onto a 1 Gig drive or do you have to periodically "flush" whatever you
have?
(3) Do you need a Fast wide SCSI drive to work effectively with these boards?
Does Enhanced IDE drives work better than SCSI for video editing?
(4) Can you output full screen video at 30 fps (or 60 fields per sec) to your
VCR, i.e., no border when you view the output? I imagine 30 fps is possible,
but 60 fileds per sec is not.
(5) Do these boards let you edit, morph, swipe, cut etc. before or after
compression to the hard drive.
(4) I know all of these boards can output video to a VCR. Do you need an
editing VCR e.g. (affordable editing VCRs) Mits HU69 or SONYSLV 920, 1000 to
get decent results (yeah, I know the Pan 1970 would be great). I imagine
something with flying erase heads is probably a must.
(5) Would it pay to use/have a graphics board like the new Videologic PCI Video
or ATI Graphics Pro Video working in conjunction with these boards to "boost"
things along for the output?
(6) Does your ouput with any of these boards approach Hi-8 or S-VHS?
(7) Should you really only use a Pentium machine for these boards and what
differences would a Pentium make (i.e., it what phases of editing). Do these
boards work with Dual Pentium machines?
Are there simple answers??
Dave Rosenstein
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
Hi David,
I too have been looking at low end DTV products for some time, and I too have
come to
a tossup between FAST and Miro.
I was demoed the FAST product by the distrubuter here in Australia and the demo
dod not go well.
Also the image quality was not what I expected.
About a month ago I went to the distrubutor here for Miro and had a good play
of their system.
On the whole the output quality of the miro was far better. (Also the demo ran
smooth as silk, which
was pretty convincing since it was my video footage we were playing with.).
One notecable 'funny' was that the scene we digitised and re-recorded (skiier
skiing), although the main action looked OK, the background (trees and bushes)
seemed to strobe as they panned past.
New Media (Nov I think) has a test of about a dozen capture cards and both FAST
and Miro rate the best.
Since then a frien of mine purchased the FAST board and I have used it to frame
grab, but again I was not real happy with the result.
VGA overlay …. Fast YES Miro NO …
YC input …….. Fast NO Miro Yes
TBC Fast Yes Miro No … I metnion this cause with the TBC
off it would not sync to my
camera at all (Cannon UC10).
I have arranged a second trial of the Miro and this time I will use my own
camera as the source.
I am really swayed to the Miro product. (from the FAST demos I've seen, the
fast works best with
small windows wheras the Miro has little or no problem with full screen).
Regards,
Wit C.
Who is the Miro dealer in OZ as I would like to arrange a demo.
Jack Swart
Sydney
Appologies for the delay in replying … I don't log in v often ..
I played with the Miro at …. LakoVision
details.
Mr Darrin James
LakoVision
3 Northcliff St
Milsons Pt 2061
02 959 5393
Let me know what you think of it !
Regards
Wit Cieslik
Wit,
Perhaps you or someone could help me. I am helping to put together a few video
editing systems for our local school. So, I am just starting to do a similar
evaluation to yours.
I am unclear on the use of some of the terms and the impact of the answers:
Fast Miro
VGA overlay YES NO
YC input NO Yes
TBC Yes No
VGA overlay:
Does Fast have software to control the overlay or just the HW to do it? I
assume you could add hardware to MIRO as well. What would be a source I could
look at (and approximate cost) for the same quality of HW/SW for Miro?
YC input:
What exactly is this? I don't see it on my camera or VCR. What is the impact of
not having it?
TBC:
Same question as YC.
Other Questions:
In what format can these products save video? MPEG, …
How much does disk drive BW effect the quality of the stored image. If I have
big fast (access speed and transfer rate) drives can I get better performance
than slower ones?
Is the compression variable and can I set it manually?
When things change too fast does the image degrade, do frames get dropped?
Does they come with non linear editing software or is that a separate purchase?
Can you recommend some products or companies to look at that are consistent
with the capabilites of FAST/MIRO.
Thanks in advance, good luck,
-Marco
Marco,
I will try to answer some of your questions, too.
YC Input means that the board will except a video signal that has the
Luminance (brightness) portion seperated from the Chrominance) or color.
This results in a higher quality video input and output as when the two,
Luminance and Chrominance are combined in one signal (Composite), they
tend to mix together and cause cross-colors (rainbox like-patterns in
images containing checkered or stripe patterns) and dot-crawl (dots
aligning the borders of colors).
TBCs or Time Base Correctors correct timing irregularities that occur
during VCR playback.
I believe that both the FAST and Miro products use the M-JPEG compression
formats although there are utilities available to convert M-JPEG to MPEG,
etc.
Disk Drive speed is pretty important with these devices, especially if you
want to upgrade in the future. If you can afford "A/V" class drives that
typically range in size from 1-10GBs, that would be the way to go.
However, any drive that can push through 700Kb/sec (which is most of them
today, as far as I know) should work fine.
Changing, complex images are hardest on the video capture devices, and
yes, I would expect that they would not look as good.
The FAST with the M-JPEG option board can be bundled with Adobe Premiere
v1.1. The Miro board comes with Ulead's Media Studio software, I think.
-John
John,
Thanks for the response. This forum will be an invaluable resource.
-Marco
Marco, the Miro also comes with Premiere, I just had to send in the
registration to get it.
John
John,
Thanks for the info.
-Marco
Hi John
Do you know when miro card writes the captured movie back to tape, does it
maintain the input resolution?
eg, If you have Hi8 resolution, and you edit this tape and write back to
another Hi8 tape will the quality suffer?
Thanks
Saugata.
Hi Marc,
wow … here goes …
VGA overlay (as I understand it) is the ability to overlay computer generated
output over the live video signal.
FAST can do this … Miro does not … This is not a bad thing as the two
devices are designed to do slightly different purposes.
FAST is designed to process you video LIVE while it happens. ('online')
Miro is designed to capture to Hard disk and you can then edit and create
overlays to your hearts content and THEN re-play it and record it out
('offline')
Y/C inputs are a higher quality video signal.
With a conventional signal, ALL the elements that make the signal are combined.
This creates some degredation of the signals as a whole.
With the Y/C signal the Chromanance and Luminance portions of the signal are
seperated 'at birth' if you like, and therefore can be transmitted with less
loss and distortion.
TBC
Acronym for Time Base Corrector.
Althogh I cannot explain in detail how this works, I can say that as you copy
tapes, each generation becomes successivly worse (VHS usually streches to about
3 or four copies before becoming completely unusable).
This is because as each generation is re-copied the 'sync' or 'controll'
information on the tape becomes degraded. Throuh each copy this degradation is
amplified.
A TBC will 're-write' this information thus preserving the quality of the
transferr.
I was interested to see that the FAST board would not show images from my
Cannon UC10 without the it's (FAST's) TBC turned on. With no TBC the best I
could get was a very wavy B&W image. With the TBC … no problem.
MJpeg for FAST (If you buy the MJPEG option)
MJpeg for Mirro
Disk BW is vital …. also clean unfragmented disk.
A slow disk means dropped frames which are entirley visable when played back !
Compression variable ? FAST .. not sure (don't remember), Miro YES.
changing image quality ? with the mirro I did notice a slight strobing of the
background during a fast panned shot.
Did not get to try this with FAST.
FAST comes bundled with ADOBE PREMIER (if you buy the MJPEG option)
Mirio comes with anther product that looks pretty good, but it's the shortened
version. I think $200 get you the upgrade to the full version that includes
video and sound editing, image editing, morphing, etc.
New Media mag has been running add for a product called RAZOR which looks
pretty good at approx $150 US.
Hope this helps,
Regards,
Wit C.