Product Reviews

Video editing has always been something Macs do better than any other platform. The ease of use, design and performance of the Mac still put it way ahead of the competition. And the Mac version of the DC30 plus video editing card is every bit as good as its PC counterpart.

The original Mac DC30 (Reviews, Vol 13 No 17, p20) arrived to mixed reviews. Primarily, its inability to work with non-Apple hardware didn't make it as popular as it should have been. That's fixed now, and is less of an issue anyway with the death of the clones. We installed the card in a Power Mac G3/266 minitower with 64Mb of RAM. With the hardware in place, the extensions loaded with ease. Once we'd restarted the Mac and loaded the bundled copy of Premiere 4.2, the system was ready for video editing.

Physically, the DC30 plus is almost identical to the DC30. It has the same composite and S-Video input and output, plus RCA audio in and out on a breakout cable. However, with a later version of the Philips ZORAN chipset, the plus is capable of lower compression and has enhanced thumbnail and rendering acceleration. Compression can go as low as 2.5:1, depending on your hard drive set-up and country's TV format.

Premiere's capture utility is the main application for transferring video to disk. In fact, apart from the DC30 QuickTime drivers and control application, Premiere is the main interface with the card. The control application, accessible from the control panel menu or Control Strip icon, lets you choose the TV standard, overlay window size and pixel aspect ratio, and little else. The pixel aspect ratio gives you a choice between the square pixels used by a computer and the rectangular pixels of the professional CCIR-601 standard. However, not only is CCIR-601 now known as ITU-R 601, but Pinnacle has the standard wrong. Instead of the 720 horizontal pixels of the true 601 standard, the DC30 plus uses 704. However, this is only an issue when you're trying to incorporate footage that's been created using the correct 601 aspect ratio.

The DC30 plus has built-in audio. Before capturing video and beginning to edit,

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the manual advises you to switch the main sound device to the DC30 plus. You may also need to adjust the audio gain in Premiere. Using the Premiere capture utility, there are two methods of setting image capture quality. Under compression, you can set one of five quality settings with a slider. Or you can limit the data rate to a set value, up to 7000Kbits/sec. If you know what data rate your hard drive is capable of sustaining, this is the best option. Otherwise, it's a case of trial and error.

You'll need a very good AV drive or RAID to get the maximum 7Mb/sec of the DC30 plus. Our G3 Power Mac's 6Gb system drive, while AV capable, could only handle about 3Mb/sec, equivalent to approximately 10:1 compression. Even at this rate, image quality was good. If you're creating video for multimedia and don't need the full frame, you can also reduce the capture size to a quarter frame of 384 x 288 pixels. During capture, you can either watch the incoming video on the Mac monitor or on a separate TV monitor. Although it's not full screen during capture, the overlay on the Mac monitor is excellent. Frame rate is smooth and colour-accurate, so an external monitor isn't an absolute necessity.

Editing video is fairly standard. The DC30 plus ships with a set of presets for NTSC and PAL video, quarter and full frame, and two data rates to help you get your project up and running quickly. All of these include the correct Preview window size for optimum quality overlay while scrubbing or previewing. With Premiere 4.2, there are plenty of options for creating layered effects with up to 99 video tracks.

When outputting your project to tape, you can either make a QuickTime movie or play directly from the timeline, as long as all effects have been rendered at the full project settings. In either case, the Control Strip utility toggles output to an external TV monitor on and off. You get a smooth overlay on the Mac, albeit small, with both settings. The Mac is still far superior to the PC when outputting the final video. The PC DC30 plus requires a plug-in for timeline play, but nothing is required on a Mac.

With its low compression, good image quality and keen price, the DC30 plus is a tempting choice for anyone who can't stretch to Radius Video Vision or Media 100. Although Firewire cards are beginning to offer excellent value in this price range, there's still plenty of life left in M-JPEG cards. One negative point about the DC30 plus is that it only has analogue inputs. However, with lower compression, the DC30 plus will be less susceptible to recompression artefacts than the fixed 5:1 of Firewire DV. For corporate video work, multimedia or hobbyists, it offers excellent value.