Description

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Canopus DV Storm
Good Condition
Real-time Video Editing

Canopus has a reputation for building super-reliable NLE solutions that use a CPU-centric design. Even if you don’t yet understand the benefits of this design, you can certainly appreciate the value of its reliability.

My experience with the Canopus DVStorm has been unique. It is the first DV-based NLE board that installed without any problems, did everything promised by the manufacturer, and, over a period of a month, never crashed running with Premiere 6.0. Not one crash — even under supposedly crash-prone Windows 98. DVStorm also runs on Windows 2000, as well as NT and Windows ME.

The DVStorm hardware design is simple. The board has a PCI bus interface, a 1394 interface chip, and a DV codec chip. For analog input and output, the board also has A/D and D/A chips. I installed DVStorm in the second slot from the AGP graphics card, where it had a unique IRQ line.

You’ll note that in my description of the board I made no mention of any special chips supporting realtime effects. And, in fact, there are none. All effects are rendered by the PC’s microprocessor. So how does the DVStorm provide realtime effects? There is a four-part answer to this question. The answer also outlines the benefits of a CPU-centric design.

First, because special effects are rendered by the PC there are no limits to the sophistication of the effects. DVStorm supports 24 realtime filters, including color correction (YUV, HSB, and RGB), mosaic, emboss, picture-in-picture, chromakey and lumakey — plus 15 realtime transitions including wipes, dissolves, page curls, and stretches. (With Premiere, realtime slow motion is not supported.) Simple realtime motion effects can be applied to realtime graphics. Thus, multiple graphics can be moved on different paths at the same time over video.

The second benefit of a CPU-centric design is that the number of video streams is limited only by the PC’s throughput. As CPU performance increases, DVStorm’s capabilities increase.

Third, the order of the effects is determined by the editor — not the designer of a special effects chip. For example, an editor can design an upper-left PIP in which the inner video wipes from one clip to another. Most FX chips cannot perform this combination of effects in realtime.

Fourth, unlike competing boards, DVStorm uses its onboard DV codec only to compress rendered effects so that DV can be continuously output via IEEE-1394. DVStorm offers more than realtime “previews” because the timeline can be played directly to 1394 output. Thus, DVStorm is realtime in a way that that neither the Pinnacle Systems DV500 nor the Matrox RT2500 is realtime. There is no need to render effects or create a DV movie prior to recording on DV tape. This saves time and space.

QUICK FACTS

Company: Canopus San Jose, Calif.; 408-954-4500

Product: DVStorm

Features: A CPU-centric design makes it unnecessary to render effects before recording to tape; supports 24 realtime filters and 15 realtime effects; ships with a large bundle of software

Price: PHP 80,900