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When I started this review, Adobe had not yet purchased Serious Magic. The acquisition makes sense: Serious Magic is that rare company that has defined new product categories to fill essential needs. It must be nice to have no competition.
DV Rack provides several tools, but at its core, it's a direct-to-disk video recording and monitoring application. It is meant to be used with a video camera on set, and it has been engineered to work with any recent Windows 2000/XP laptop or desktop with a good video card. (Serious Magic recommends a 1.4GHz-or-faster processor and at least 256MB RAM.) DV Rack has to be tethered to the camera, so it is probably most useful in the studio or under controlled outdoor situations. While it's not out of the question, you are probably not going to use DV Rack for run-and-gun shooting.
There are two versions of DV Rack 2: SD and HD. DV Rack HD 2 is meant to work with HDV, DVCPRO 50, and DVCPRO HD. The HD version provides 1280 x 720 monitoring for pixel-to-pixel accurate display of 720p footage. Timecode support for Adobe Premiere Pro, Apple Final Cut Pro, Sony Vegas, and Avid's line of NLEs has been added, so you can save clips to a hard drive via FireWire in the format you plan to use in your NLE.
What's new?
The first innovation in DV Rack 2 that grabbed my attention is the Stop-Motion Animation Recording feature. Essentially, the DV Rack software can be used to trigger the camera in a frame-by-frame mode. The basis for a software intervalometer, Stop-Motion Animation Recording is just one of the several "single-frame" recording modes - there's also Time-Lapse Recording and Motion-Activated Recording. For time-lapse, the options are more or less infinite: frames per second, frames per minute, or frames per hour. Any time interval you can type into the entry field is what the camera will record.
I did a short stop-motion animation to try out this feature. I can report that it's a very good replacement for Animation Toolworks' LunchBox, a dedicated frame recorder that has been around for at least a decade. Stop-Motion mode is operated from the direct-to-disk module in DV Rack, working in the pause/record mode. From...