DV500 here and working AS ASVERTISED!!!!

[Dr Alien]

I just recieved my DV500 yesterday and spent the entire night exploring its editing capabilities and stability. I must say, for 1.0 drivers and so many features, I am damn impressed. I've been using these prosumer cards since the Miro DC1 (7 years ago) and I've never had an out of the box experience this fulfilling. Overlay plays back perfectly smooth, even during capture and works with multimonitor enabled (on the primary monitor). Stretching Premiere across my 2 screen makes the editing experience much more akin to the AVID, which I prefer above all things (my work won't let us use the AVID for personal projects, hence this purchase). The playback is realtime with realtime wipes and dissolves via analog preview. Instant video works beautifully to render the effects for output to DV off the timeline. I have no problem outputting straight cuts-only edits right off the timeline to my digital 8 camcorder via firewire. Rendering of effects is very fast; your average 1 sec dissolve took less than 10 secs (horribly rough and probably long estimate). The DVtools DV capture and logging software is quite feature complete and works great, there is onscreen playback of the DV video through firewire without any audio lag (software based cards tend to lag in their display except the raptor's passthrough of course). Titles from premiere and titledeko, which really is an excellent titler, displayed in realtime though not over and additional effect (similar to AVID Xpress) multiple effects required rendering. MPEG2 export was accelerated and the export directly off the timeline. I'm not sure what else to say. I have yet to get it to work under 2000 (using it in 98se) but have not put any effort into that installation. 98 installation went without incident. I'm out of things to say. So far so good. Any questions? Oh, and I'm very happy to be using NLE and a Geforce for Lightwave on the same machine.

thank you very much.

[Jerry Jones]

Well... it's nice to see at least
one happy Pinnacle product user in
a world filled with so many unhappy
ones.

(Keep testing it---put it through
the paces---find the bugs---if any.)

[jeff b]

It's very nice to hear a good report on the DV500. There are also a couple of good reports trickling in on the rec.video.desktop newsgroup, too. It gives me hope for the future...

[jeff b]

On a different note, however, I've been following a thread on rec.video.desktop regarding a couple people who are having some kind of problem with sound not playing back. The latest post on that thread is very interesting:

-snip-

From: Laurent MICHEL
Topic: Re: Help! No sound with DV500...
Message: 4 of 5 (In response to Bart Mol)
Sent: Tue, 04 Jan 2000 00:18:00 -0800

I've just called Pinnacle French helpdesk. What they told me is :
1) DV500 has not been tested : it had to be ready and shipped for Christmas sales!!
2) Concerning our problem we have to check the following : a- Be sure that the DV500 is ALONE on its IRQ. Same thing for the soundcard. In both case, preferred IRQ are ranging from 9 to 12 included.
3) During Premiere's install, DV500 board should not be present in the PC.
4) Make sure that sound card support DirectX 7.0
5) Upgrade Premiere 5.1a (distributed in France) to 5.1c by downloading upgrade files from www.adobe.com

I haven't tried yet. We'll see!! Bye

-snip-

That one really threw me for a loop! Yet another marketing coup, eh?

[Elie]

I also heard on the news groups that people are having problems playing back in Real Time, were premiere has to render the whole project just to output analog back to tape.

Definetely.. a not as advertised product I would say.

Elie

[This_Idiot]

Yeah, I've heard some stuff like that too. Can I take you back to the preview I wrote 23November ?

"When it comes to output, the options are to stream to DV, in which case the
project needs rendering. I don’t have any figures from Pinnacle to indicate the
rendering speed or process although I would guess that unchanged portions of the
DV are copied out in realtime. Certainly even the 'realtime' effects need to be
rendered."

So this shouldn't really be a surprise. In fact the RT2000 pre-release documentation also gives a similar scenario, although they DO give a rendering time, quoting 2-3 times RT.

BTW, when I talked to some retailers back in November, they already had DV500's with advanced beta drivers. So I'd personally be wary of claims that it hasn't been tested. Although it would make a bizarre press coup!

[Dr Alien]

Well, I can't speak for those having the problems you have described though I will state the obvious; with literally thousands of different system configurations combined with thousands of software/driver configurations, it's amazing this kind of demanding system works on anyone's machine. This is why AVID only sells complete turnkey systems...and they're on a mac, the most homogenous system on earth!

Mine works well as have most of the hardware I've put in my machines. I say it's all in the motherboard and I've had great success with Tyan and Asus. I don't know why these people have problems but I don't know if they're any good with fixing them to begin with.

As for realtime, assuming my experience as a baseline, you do not need to render an entire sequence into one file for analog OR DV output. Both playback off the timeline for output to tape. DV requires that the effects be rendered (hardware accerated or not) because Firewire is simply an IO port to the digital tape. The camera does not perform and compression or conversion to the DV stream and the card does not convert render and recompress in realtime. It renders in realtime for the realtime effects, hence a dissolve does not require the render, it simply plays. Analog output however is all handled on the card, the card plays two clips, applying the dissolve in realtime as it plays. This is raw, uncompressed effects being output to the TV. When you render the effect it compresses it into DV which can then be transfered via the firewire interface. I think I've made this as clear as I can. Please ask me more questions.

Oh, I got the card to work in 2000, I found that the pinnacle firwire driver cause the BSOD on boot. Using the 1394 driver that 2000 autodetects (a generic Texas instruments, I think) Allows the system to boot and all analog element work just as well as under 98se. I have not yet tried firewire capture or output with this configuration though- I will tonight after work. If that works then I am truly amazed. If only I could get netzero or aol to work in 2000 I will leave 98 behind for everything.

------------------
Why is the word "monkey" so damn funny?