Is everybody aware of the 'in house' review of the Pinnacle DC1000 MPEG2 system at http://www.videoguys.com/dc1000review.html? To read that it seems that MJPEG is dead and MPEG2 is the new way to go for NLE. The king is dead, long live the king! Why is everything so quiet about MPEG2? Is it cost, or lack of understanding/fear of new technology that is keeping people away? Has anybody got a DC1000 and if so how do you find it?
TIA
Nigel Longman
If only it were just a question of buying the card...
I have seen a demo of the DC1000, and we will buy one, but if you have work in progress the upgrade path is not trivial.
At present we have a DC30+, which runs best under Win95/98 (I find 98 more stable). But DC1000 drivers are NT only at present. So we are talking about another machine (no big deal but it all takes time to build) or a machine with two perating systems. But they cannot read each others file systems (yes, I know there is a 3rd party FAT32 program for NT - but that is only one way, and its just one more thing to investigate). Neither is there any easy way (as far as I can see) to convert the footage from the DC30+'s codec to MPEG2.
Also, NT does not handle EIDE disks as well as 95/98 - though the higher compression of MPEG2 means this is not a critical issue. Even so, I would prefer SCSI on an NT machine, especially as I would also use it as a server to test out delivering video.
Windows 2000 should resolve some of these problems... but have you tried to get a copy?
Some of these considerations are specific to us; other people will have analagous ones of their own. I think you will find that in general, the people who could use a DC1000 NOW have constraints on their time, and have to keep their current setup working during a crossover period.
Time exists to stop too much happening at once.
Peter