X-Denny_Williams
Imported Account
Jun 27, 1998, 5:54 AM
Post #10 of 13
(2275 views)
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Hi, ya'll:
Frankly, from a third party point of view I find your arguments very informative. In late April I bought a PII 333mgz computer with 128megs ram, 6.1 gig HD and 9GB scsi Cheatah, the fastest AV drive at a reasonable price. The editing system, installed with the package was the DVMaster with Ulead MediaStudio Pro-5 which is an editing, CG, Paint, and audio editor, with Sound Forge thrown in for good measure. The entire system was about $6,000 from TriState out of New York, a company I will never deal with again, but that's another story.
I considered Casablanca primarily for its ease of use and stability and rejected it primarily for three reasons (which are not necessarily valid): 1--It was new, and for that reason, slightly scary. 2--Price. Certainly not outrageous, but I really needed a new computer, modem, etc and had to consider that as a factor. Also, I wanted the ability to work with analog and digital and to be able to convert between the two formats. DV input was available at further cost but even then I wasn't sure if it was input only or full I/O. Finally, 3: I was worried about the closed architecture and being held hostage to the whims of a single manufacturer.
My thoughts, after nearly 3 months living with my decision:
First, the learning curve was extremely high. I read the DVM and Ulead manuals from cover to cover first and then spent nearly 100 hours before I felt comfortable. (I spent hours and hours following the manual's description of chroma-keying for titles and they still looked cheesy. Then I found a line in the Ulead manual saying "you can also perform this function using the alpha channel." It was 10 times easier and looked 10 times better but, hey, I didn't know). I was reading through my graphics card manual and found a neat little function the computer people had never activated--TV on your computer. Cool! So I activated it and the program wrapped itself around the editing program and took it over like the seed pods in that Sci-Fi movie. I innactivated the program but it was still there. Removed the whole graphics card, re-installed it and it was still there. Removed everything, still there. Had to reformat my entire computer and was down nearly a week. Since then I edited a family vacation from several years ago shot on 8mm, a DV baptism, DV wedding and was working on a DV graduation when I happened to open the DVMaster program without closing the Ulead program...bad mistake since the DVM driver is used by both programs. The system crashed and the driver dissappeared and would not be re-loaded. Several hours on long-distance with Fast and Ulead did not help (Fast seemed more helpful). Finally, yesterday, I fixed it myself, almost by accident.
On the positive side, every problem seems to have been caused by inexperience. If you don't click the wrong field or push the wrong button it seems to work fine--just not very forgiving of mistakes. And, although I'm fairly computer literate, I'd never used an NLE system before. I feel like someone with experience in say, Media 100 or Avid could be editing in a few hours. And I think I could now teach someone to the point they were editing on their own in a few hours. Once you learn the basics, it's very easy and intuitive to drop the clips into the timeline, add your FX or titles and render a movie. On the home video I used a little of this and that, but for the buying public I seldom use anything but titles and crossfades (1000 effects sound neat, but 99% of the time 99% of them are just too jaring to have a place). A seven minute clip with 5 cross-fades, titles and music takes about half an hour to render (more, if you want animation like a simple flying font). I supposedly have the ability to partition my drive into 4 gig sections but I can't seem to get it to work, so now I am stuck with 2 gig, which is frustrating at times, and not an issue, as I understand it, with Casablanca.
The picture quality, graphics and titles is excellent--no degradation in either format. In fact, and don't argue with me here, analog comes out better than it went in, because I can improve saturation, brightness, contrast, hue, etc...but then you Cassie users must know what I'm talking about.
Sorry this is so long. I still am not certain I made the right decision. It may depend more on the support you all get from DRACO in the coming years than anything else. After 10 years of videography as a side job I jumped into it full-time and with a dwindling cash reserve decided to go whole hog digital and NLE. Had I not had that cash reserve and if I had needed money immediately, the learning curve would have put me on welfare I'm afraid. I can do some beautiful stuff with this system (I'm getting raves on quality and professional look) but my nightmare is having a major SNAFU/crash when I can least afford it.
On top of all those pluses and minuses, I do have this neat new computer, with a 56K modem and MS Office, in which I created a nifty little brochure. That surely counts for something, right?
...right?...
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