Just some information which may be of interest to those looking for a way to capture video as a source for making VideoCD's.

Last night I received and installed an ADS Pyro Firewire card and having updated my 2 year old 233mmx pentium platform to Windows 98SE as is required. It all ran nicely first time, capturing and playing back video at 3.6M/s drop free. I then produced a test VCD which unlike some of my previous efforts was actually white book compliant, my "2 channel" sound that has plagued me for so long was actually "stereo" and I was very impressed with the image quality.

At a cost of $98US plus delivery to Australia (in three days - 3 of us got together to reduce the cost) it saved me heaps as I no longer need to buy a new modern computer to run something like a DVraptor card, so I am about $2000US better off as a result. There is also an interesting marriage with my miro analogue capture card which in combination has given me some un expected avenues in this new era.

I will now spend the saving to celebrate in Hawaii next week (for 8 days) to get some great touring vision to test the system when I get back.

Cheers

-- Ross McL (rmclennan@esc.net.au), November 16, 1999

Answers

What did you use to encode the MPG? From what I see, it's a DV capture card that doesn't do straight-to-MPG encoding.

Steve

-- Steve (beepblip@hotmail.com), November 17, 1999.

Hi Steve,

The ADS Pyro card is a firewire card which in conjunction with the supplied software, in this case Uleads Video Studio 3, allows you to do full NLE editing from full size frames and to gain the advantages in image quality that go with that process. The specification on the ADS site quite clearly states what the outputs are from this package and I believe with VS4 the output capability is extended beyond mpeg-1 to include mpeg-2 and a couple of others options as well. The Pro NLE programs such as Adobe Premiere are behind in supplying compatibility for this card, to be expected as it will blow everything else away.

Let me explain my experience of a few hours with this combo as others may not have understood the specification either (hands on is a great teacher, so this is a long posting with detail):

The card allows firewire capture in conjunction with VS3, I am PAL so it allows captures in a 720 by 576 format (NTSC 720 x 480) using the DV codec at a capture data rate of between 3.45 and 3.6M/s depending on the content of your images at 25.000 fps (29,97 NTSC). The specification actually says up to 3.9M/s but I have not as yet experienced that. The specification mentions that 4G of space on the hard drive is used for 20 minutes of captured dv video.

After editing you have a number of options for output, I will only mention 2. You can playback the edited image to the dv camera BUT TO DO THAT you must render the edited movie as another type 1 avi so that takes up ANOTHER 4G's for every 20 minutes - that is not explained in the spec at all, so in fact 20 minutes of full frame DV movie will take up 8G's of hhd. The DV codec does not allow resizing.

If you select from the drop down output menu to do a MPEG-1 output you have a number of size options and data rates set around the NTSC sizes. There is not an option to go automatically to a VCD MPEG-1 but you can manually set that up so in my case I chose 352 x 288, 143K/s data rate which approximates the 1150Kbits/s required for a vcd, 224kbit/sec stereo sound and you stand back and out comes your vcd mpeg which Nero said was a compliant file and I had no trouble burning a quick example. I am not quite prepared to say what I think the image is like yet as I have not spent enough time to compare vcd files from the same source material. You can also produce an avi for use with encoders such as LSX or Panasonic etc etc. I do not yet know if the output for those encoders must be a type 2 avi or whether they accept a type 1 dv avi.

So for $100US you get the firewire card and the software that will give equally as good an image as any NLE cards costing over $1000 and better images than most direct captures to mpeg-1 format. The available options for editing are well below the polished product that the likes of Adobe Premiere 5.1 achieves. Time is a problem because every frame is rendered and that really requires a high speed CPU but who cares about time in this business with such a saving - buy one and come to Hawaii on the savings!!!!!!!! Even my old 233mmx computer plays full frame images jitterless on the computer screen and I have no intention of updating to just save time.

At long last someone has made something at its true value - yes ADS PYRO IS THE NEW ERA in NLE just as I said in the first posting.

-- Ross McL (rmclennan@esc.net.au), November 18, 1999.

Forgot to add that one must tick the cdrom option to ensure a compliant vcd file output.

Would not be surprised if the codec was LSX based as Ulead is listed as a partner on their web site.

The interesting thing with this package is that no longer is there a requirement to use stand alone avi encoders or NLE program timeline plugins (at considerable cost - just check the costs of digigami and the like) for rendering direct from the timeline to mpeg - it all comes with the package.

It is also interesting to note that people with analogue capture cards such as miro can run them in parallel and use the codec to produce avi's that can be included with the output from the time line of VS3. For example I used Hollywood fx to produce a video camera flyin avi and it rendered from the VS3 timeline. I also, last night, used Adobe Premiere generated avi's for more professional looking titles and motion transitions (a dot moving around a map) that also rendered directly from the timeline even though mixed in with dv source material. The trick is to use the same frame sizes even though the source maybe analogue.

Certainly a totally new era at an astounding cost.

-- Ross McL (rmclennan@esc.net.au), November 18, 1999.