Content area
Full Text
Reviewing complex editing programs is a challenge because excellence is in the details. It's the subtleties, the little touches, that make your day run smoothly or exhaust you by the end of the edit. What you often read is a recitation of features instead of a review. I decided to review Discreet's edit plus 5 through the perspective of editing a long-form documentary and to explore the philosophy behind this moderately priced NT-based editing program.
I evaluated a Matrox DigiSuite-based edit plus system. The software also supports Pinnacle's Targa boards. Despite differences between the hardware capabilities of DigiSuite and Targa cards, Discreet treats edit as one product with two levels, edit and edit plus. The plus version adds multi-camera editing, real-time parametric equalization, VST audio plug-ins, and 3D DVE functions with Pinnacle's RTX and SDX boards.
Our review system was a Compaq AP500 Workstation with dual Pentium III 600-MHz processors; 256 MB RAM; a DigiSuite LE with DigiDesktop; 21-inch monitors; and 36 gigabytes (GB) of external storage (four 9-GB LVD drives). IBM and Intergraph workstations are also certified for edit. A network of authorized resellers sells turn-key systems priced from $25,000 to $35,000, depending on hardware configuration. edit is $7,995. edit plus is $11,995.
The DigiSuite LE version offers higher framerate captures (500 KB/fame maximum, about 13:1 compression) than the Targa options. The LE board supports real-time luma and chroma keying, dual stream YUV color correction, and a 2D DVE. Twenty-seven GB of video storage (nine are reserved for audio) was not enough to hold the hours of footage we shot for our 90-- minute documentary about the 100-year history of American picture postcards, entitled Gifts in the Mail. We added a 75 GB Medea VideoRaid RT disk array to the system (Medea's current model holds 120 GB and is just over $2,000). It took a minute to connect the drive using the supplied SCSI cable to the AP500's built-in port. We ran tests at the highest resolutions to make sure the throughput was enough to handle any task. Medea's VideoRaid RT passed with flying colors.
Next, we tested image quality. Super16mm footage was transferred on a Philips Spirit DataCine to Betacam SP. We did a side-by-side comparison of the original master and the output...